The 32-year-old former Black Cap has had plenty of practice at coming to terms with injury or illness interruptions during his career.
But he still needed a day to mope about when he realised he had probably damaged a ligament in his knee.
The right-armer is out for up to a month.
The sideline has become an awfully familiar companion for Craig. Since the beginning of the 2016-17 season he has played in just 17 of Otago's 83 games across the three formats.
He has missed the majority of those games through injury but was overlooked for the Volts first-class season opener against Wellington last month. He was named in the 12 for the next match against Auckland.
That game was abandoned without a ball bowled but Craig injured his knee during a warm-up game of football.
"That was pretty frustrating. I was trying to work my way back into the team," he said.
Craig had done a lot of rehabilitation work to get his troublesome back right, as well.
"So to get this injury by doing something as mundane as kicking a soccer ball was pretty hard to take to be honest.
"But it is not all doom and gloom. It is two to four weeks and hopefully closer to two."
Craig lost an entire season to chronic fatigue early in his career.
But he fought his way back from the illness and grabbed an international opportunity when Jeetan Patel made himself unavailable for the Black Caps tour of the West Indies in 2014.
Craig produced a man-of-the-match effort in the first test, taking four wickets in each innings to help seal a 186-run win.
The left-hander also hit the first ball he faced in test cricket for six. It was a cracking start to his international career.
He went on to take 50 wickets in 15 tests. But he picked up a side strain in the first test against India in Kanpur in September 2016 and returned home to recover. The recovery did not go well.
There was a knee injury and then an old back injury flared up.
He missed the 2016-17 domestic season and nearly walked away from the game.
Craig had surgery and returned in 2017-18. While he was not able to bowl as well as he would have liked, he was not ready to retire either.
He got himself as fit as he had ever been and was named co-captain for the 2018-19 season. But his troublesome back intervened again and he missed most of the season.
"You can sit there saying poor me - and I definitely needed a day to process it and be pretty angry. But then you have to say what can I do to get better and get back playing," he said about his latest setback.
This season, though, there is competition for his spot.
"That is something I haven't had to contend with much during my career. There is a bit of self-doubt because I have been injured and there has been some new guys who have come into the squad.
"All of a sudden, I wasn't necessarily an automatic pick as I was early on in my career. That is when you start putting a bit more pressure on yourself, so I was working through all that."
Craig was fresh from notching a century for Otago A and had bowled well during the preseason.
He was looking forward to an opportunity but will now have to wait a little longer.
