Stubbs batted for eight hours and 19 minutes and faced 372 balls for his 302*.

Think of Tristan Stubbs and you probably picture a bright-eyed human cocker spaniel puppy bounding around a T20 somewhere. You would not be wrong. His 70 games in that format is more than four times as many as the first-class matches he has played and almost three times his total of list A games.

So the undefeated 302 Stubbs scored for the Warriors against the Tuskers in Pietermaritzburg on Wednesday and Thursday is a game changer. He made four centuries in his other 26 first-class innings and replaced the injured Temba Bavuma to earn a Test debut against India at Newlands last month, but his latest performance makes him a serious contender for an extended run in the Test XI.

Stubbs batted for eight hours and 19 minutes and faced 372 balls for a rifling strike rate of 81.18. He hit 37 fours and six sixes - 60.93% of his runs - and the 473 he shared with Matthew Breetzke, who made a mere 188, for the third wicket is the highest stand by any pair of South African batters for any wicket, in any format, at any level, and in any country.

Ten other triple centuries have been scored in South Africa, six of them from October 2009 - when Stephen Cook made 390 for the Lions against the Warriors in East London. That remains the record score in first-class cricket in the country.

"I'd imagine Stubbs' innings was far more entertaining than mine, certainly in terms of balls faced and boundaries hit," Cook, who batted for two minutes short of 14 hours and faced 648 balls - 276 more than Stubbs - told Cricbuzz on Friday (February 23). His strike rate of 60.16 was 21.02 points lower than Stubbs' but he hit 17 more fours.

Not that it's a competition. For one thing, Cook opened the batting and Stubbs took guard at No. 4. For another, Cook was circumspection in pads while Stubbs is a creature of the modern age. For still another, the realities of the respective matches were different.

Cook walked out after the Warriors had batted for 146.3 overs before being dismissed for 532 midway through the second session on day two. Stubbs was called to the crease when his team slipped to 20/2 after 10 overs.

"We had fielded for near on five sessions, so I was very tired physically when I started my innings," Cook said. "At the end of day three, when I was [202 not out], we were going to declare and try and make a game of it. But the teams couldn't come to an agreement over what the score should be, so we ended up batting on."

Arduous though scoring triple hundreds becomes, they have their gentler moments. "The fielding team don't give up, but your runs become a whole lot easier," Cook said. "They push fielders back, and they're quite happy to let you have one and get off strike."

Making a pile of runs requires several facilitating factors. "It's an incredibly long time to be batting, so the contexts of being able to get a triple hundred need to work in your favour," Cook said. "You need to play incredibly well and probably have a bit of luck on your side. But also the game situation has to allow for it.

"I think there'd be many innings where guys would have got triple hundreds but the game situation only allowed them to get 250, or whatever the case was. In Stubbs' case he was lucky that the Warriors lost two early wickets. So he had enough time. But a lot of things have to go right for it to happen."

One of them, in Cook's case, was that he and Thami Tsolekile, who scored 141, put on 365 in a key partnership for the sixth wicket. "You need a willing partner," Cook said. If you look at a lot of the big scores, there was often a willing and able accomplice. In Stubbs' case, Breetzke was probably equally driven to get a big score. Often there's a partnership or a team element driving you on, otherwise the concentration goes and you get over-ambitious and give your wicket away. You need something to drive you. In my case it was that we were still so far behind the game, so you couldn't give it away."

Despite his feat Cook would labour for more than the next six years before he made his Test debut, against England in Centurion in January 2016. Getting past Graeme Smith, Alviro Petersen and Dean Elgar wasn't easy. But Cook made it count, scoring 115 in his first innings at the highest level.

Stubbs made his Test debut on an awful pitch and scored three and one. He deserves another crack, because even cocker spaniel puppies grow up.