It’s not make or break, but Round 2 at Eden Park really does matter...

SOUTH AFRICA and New Zealand have been here before, though the stakes were infinitely higher the last time they crossed swords in Auckland.

Then, as it will be tomorrow (3am start, SA time), in the final one-day international of a riveting five-match series, it was a case of winner takes all.

Happily, the loser in this case will not go into months of misery and introspection, and the world’s glare will not be privy to tears from proud men who have got desperately close to their ultimate goal, and failed.

A fifth match in a series is no World Cup semi-final, but the scenario is most tantalisingly set fair for another thriller, in the early South African hours of the weekend.

Captain AB de Villiers has already said he and his side are looking forward to the test, an opportunity to at least go into the same “sheds”, as the Kiwis call dressing-rooms.

Those sheds saw many tears the last time they hosted them in a 50-over contest.

In the other room, and all around in a stadium awash with pride, there was song and delirium, and everything that goes with the joy of falling on the right side of a thriller.

South Africa were the most uncomfortable of visitors in those late hours, on 24 March 2015, on one of the most dramatic – and traumatic – nights in South African sport.

The cast list that gathered that night will not all be there for the two-year reunion, because life moves on.

Grant Elliot, whose unerring swish over long-on sparked black bliss in New Zealand, and the death of the South African land on which he was born, is no longer part of the Kiwi set-up.

But, his name is etched in Kiwi lore, for he delivered the ultimate joy.

Brendan McCullum now gives speeches of significance, over the pugnacious innings that he used to spark the Kiwi assault.

Instead, the Black Caps have found solace in the sanguine sword of one Martin Guptill, whose highlights reel from Wednesday’s sorcerous display in Hamilton will live long in the memory.

For South Africa, Dale Steyn is still nursing fresh wounds on an ageing body, and Kyle Abbott has swapped the uncomfortable bib of 2015 for comforts of the English coast.

Life has gone on, and South Africa have drawn a line on the events of that night and, tellingly, the morning before that fateful semi-final started.

They can’t go back, but the world will take them there, anyway.

They will look for signs of “mental frailty”, signs of wounds reappearing, but no-one can ever recreate the tumultuous, final throes of the battle of Auckland in 2015.

All De Villiers and his men can do is square up to the beast that confronts them now, and look it dead in the eye, and dare not blink this time.

That won’t exorcise any demons forever, but it will go a long way to steeling themselves for similar moments that will confront them later this year, in the Champions Trophy.

It is with that in mind that tomorrow’s clash at Eden Park has taken on a more serious shade. It matters, as every international matters.

But there is history there, and South Africa would love to scribe a fresh chapter, one that speaks of a deeper resolve, and an ability to handle the inevitable pressure points that will crop up.

Those who are easily seduced by the immediacy of things used to speak of the death of 50-over cricket, when T20 cricket swished its hips at us over a decade ago.

And yet, it is contests like the one that played out on 24 March 2015, that stuck in the memory forever.

Those matters, stretched out over seven hours, make and break men. They ebb, they flow, and then thrash to an intoxicating climax, with heroes and zeroes.

Tomorrow at Eden Park, the Kiwis and the Proteas know that it is not quite make or break. But, boy does it matter.