Nate and the other cliquey dullards - go look elsewhere, this is beyond your attention span.
The match had already been affected by rain, the forecast for the final day was always bad and yea it's NZ with a ground that isn't going to get properly covered or doesn't drain well - however you want to call it. It's incredible how conservative NZ were. You are trying to salvage something from a Test series when you're well on top. You have to win. This idea that you just shrug your shoulders and blame God for something eminently predictable happening is ridiculous. It would have taken a miracle for a full day's play to have happened. Most of the time you lose most of the day and yes the whole day is unlucky but still a distinct possibility. So for sake of argument lets say on average you get a session in. That's 30 overs for simplicity.
So NZ were 175 runs ahead with 39 + 30 overs remaining. The 175 runs is useful but not overly so. Because if SA bat most of those overs they may or may not score that many themselves, so it may save NZ 2 overs for change of innings if they need to bat again. But NZ batted so unbelievably slowly in the process of getting that lead, the 2 overs is trivial compared to the gains made by pacing the innings better.
NZ approached it wrongly. They needed to win. The game was always likely to be heavily curtailed. They should have aimed to blast a 100 run lead - yes it's easy to say in hindsight if you wiped out the 5th day, but that should of been the approach given the likely loss of overs and the series situation. They already started the day 7 runs ahead with 6 wickets in hand ffs. Seriously NZ would have had a better chance winning by losing 6 wickets off 6 balls than doing what they did. They went a long way to batting *themselves* out of the game.
Lets say for the sake of argument NZ scored 93 runs in 20 overs in the morning session (the 7th and 8th wickets put on 80 off 115 balls anyway - the 8th wicket was 34 off 35 before the farcical proceedings of Patel scoring 5 off 18), you could easily achieve that batting normally or showing a little more *intent*. The aim should have been 100 lead, if you still have the batting left and are going quickly, you can go beyond that. That's 39 extra overs of batting saved compared to what actually happened. Yes you have 75 less runs. But if you're chasing those in the 4th innings with a full lineup. How many overs do you think that will take? 8? 10? 12 at a push? Given the rain you're highly unlikely to be chasing anything significantly higher than 100, so it's not like you have a period where you have to worry about losing wickets in the 4th innings - besides the fact you need to win anyway.
Oh and batting like that would also have given NZ about another 30 overs to bowl SA out, with 2 taken out for change of innings and the remaining few to slog down whatever the target is.
But you know. Let's blame it on the rain. New Zealand did not deserve to get 'another crack' on the final day.