Much more than a game

It was comforting in the late 1960s to learn that the composed, sturdily elegant figure of Basil D’Oliveira was in the England cricket team. He was a man, we felt, who would see us through.

This absorbing book, significant beyond the confines of cricket, is an account of the suffering and frustrations that beset his early career, the astonishing web of intrigue, bribery and political pressure in which he later found himself, and his eventual triumph. Because of his straightforward cricketing skills, his mere presence in England, and in the England team, could be said to have changed the world. This book is also a history of the stupidity and injustice of apartheid.

In the 1950s D’Oliveira was a cricket- ing legend among his own people, his astonishing exploits ignored by, or un- known to, white South Africans; ‘black’ players did not count. At last there came a chance for him and his colleagues to measure themselves against the best. A West Indian team agreed to tour South Africa. This was prevented by black politics, on the grounds that it would sanction apartheid, and D’Oliveira, now 28 (b. 1931), despaired.

A letter arrived from John Arlott, signalling a vacancy for a professional in the Lancashire League. There was a whip-round for D’Oliviera’s airfare and hesitantly, fearfully, he flew to England. He had seldom been allowed to play on grass, only on matting spread over gravel.

He was a disaster. (The kindness and patience of the people of Middleton is one of the heart-warming themes of this book.) When his team-mates took him to the pub they lost him; he had gone to look for the ‘Coloured’ entrance. He always walked a pace or two behind his white colleagues; he had no small talk, he didn’t drink — and he couldn’t play.