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Manchester - Saturday's World Cup clash between the Proteas and Australia at Old Trafford was never supposed to be a dead rubber.
In fact, it was a fixture that stood out for South African captain Faf du Plessis when the schedule for the tournament was announced all the way back in April last year and he immediately thought about the possibility of it serving as an effective quarter-final.
Instead, Saturday will mean absolutely nothing to South Africa's World Cup.
It is as anti-climactic as it could possibly be for the Proteas, who are playing the Aussies at the World Cup in England exactly 20 years after their famous, heartbreaking semi-final loss in the 1999 edition of tournament against the same opposition in the same country.
The prospect of South African redemption two decades on is now non-existent, but there will always be something about this fixture, regardless of the context or format.
Du Plessis, who admits that Australia are his "favourite" opposition, was just 14-years-old when the Proteas tied that semi-final at Edgbaston as the hopes of an entire nation were crushed.
"Yeah, funnily enough, I was quite young at that stage and when you watched the game and you didn't understand the finer details," he recalled.
"Watching it back now, you see a completely different game.
"I see South Africa cruising and then Warney (Shane Warne) coming on and bowling ... one ball hitting on the toe and going to slip, and you are thinking with DRS, could it have been different?
"And then you watched the last over and you think Lance (Klusener) is seeing the ball so big and he could hit a boundary at any stage of that over.
"But then you put yourself in that situation ... it's not always as easy as it looks and there's not that clarity of thinking because there's so much pressure.
"It's easy to sit now and go, 'Why wasn't there a discussion between the batter and the tailender?'
"But it doesn't work like that and everything happens so quickly.
"I just look at the game now a lot differently because I have gone through a lot of these events as well now.
"There were just small margins in the game that completely went against South Africa."
Du Plessis acknowledged on Friday that. following the completion of the World Cup, he would take a couple of weeks to consider his international future.
Play on Saturday starts at 14:30 (SA time).
@LloydBurnard is in England covering the 2019 Cricket World Cup for Sport24 ...
