Botham’s Century: My 100 great cricketing characters. Ian Botham
suddenly – and so far. Ben Johnson, who won the 1988 Seoul Olympics 100 metres in a world-record time before he was exposed as a drugs cheat, comes close. But from being a South African sporting pin-up – a God-fearing, clean-cut, successful captain of his country, revered by fans and sponsors – Cronje was suddenly despised worldwide. And he gets no sympathy from me.
When you consider how long South Africa had spent in the doldrums because of apartheid, and the giant strides they had made in the eight years since being readmitted to sport’s mainstream, it must have been a crushing blow to their national pride. In 1994, when Kepler Wessels led them to victory at Lord’s, and when Francois Pienaar accepted the rugby World Cup from President Mandela a year later, South Africa had regained the respect lost over 25 years of blinkered politics. At a stroke, Cronje’s greed dispersed that pride and replaced it with dark clouds of shame. What a waste – under his leadership, South Africa had emerged as the likeliest challengers to Australia’s domination of Test cricket, and it seemed inevitable that they would have employed him in a coaching or managerial capacity when his playing days were over.
Now he’s been banned for life from all forms of cricket. In the summer of 2001, he was even barred from making an after-dinner speech at a benefit function for his old Free State team-mate Gerhardus Liebenberg – and I’m not surprised. I wouldn’t want him to open my local school fête.
It still sickens me when I think of the way I applauded his decision to forfeit an innings at the Centurion Test against England 17 months earlier. At the time, like most people, I thought it was a wonderful gesture by Cronje to make a game of it for the spectators after three days had been wiped out by rain and condemned the match to a certain draw. I wrote in my column for the Mirror that Cronje’s foresight was a great step forward for cricket, only to discover later that he had been following an altogether more devious agenda which was nothing to do with sportsmanship, and everything to do with lining his own pockets.
While England, unsuspecting accessories to the sting, had every right to celebrate their two-wicket win, I felt I’d been duped, conned and cheated when the truth came out. Cronje had not horse-traded and contrived a tight finish for the good of the game, but for a £5,000 backhander and a leather jacket from some bookmaker who stood to lose a fortune if the game petered out into a draw. Mike Atherton said at the time it felt like the cheapest Test win of his career, and now we know why. At the King Commission, more sordid details emerged about Cronje’s attempts to draw vulnerable team-mates into his web of deceit. Picking on Herschelle Gibbs, a Cape-coloured batsman, as a target for his scheming was particularly loathsome.
In effect, Cronje now lives in exile among his own people. He has to rebuild his life, if he can, knowing the cricket community worldwide despises him. I could go on to say what a fine batsman, and respected captain, he was – but who cares now? Nobody will remember him for those things any more.
There have been other examples of how the game of cricket has had an impact on the passage of history. None are so quite vivid as that which came to be known as the D’Oliveira affair.
In these post-apartheid days, when the new South Africa is doing its best to repaint its political landscape in all the colours of the rainbow, it is hard to imagine the context in which the political furore erupted that followed Basil’s belated inclusion in the England squad for the 1968–69 tour to South Africa as a replacement for the injured Tom Cartwright, eventually led to the cancellation of the tour, and thrust the republic into sporting isolation for more than twenty years.
But the fact is that, in 1968, governed by hard-line Prime Minister John Vorster, South Africa was still utterly committed to maintaining its hated racist subjugation of black and coloured people. For supporters of the status quo there, the name Basil D’Oliveira represented the kind of independence and strength among what it considered to be its underclass, which they feared and despised. For the rest he became a symbol of hope.
Categorized in those days in his homeland as a Cape Coloured, Basil arrived in England from South Africa in the early 1960s to make a career for himself in professional cricket. His performances with bat and ball, a hard-hitting striker using an immensely heavy bat and a partnership-breaking specialist swing bowler at slow-medium pace, earned him his Test debut in 1966, and by 1968 he was a regular in the side.
After South Africa had refused the New Zealand Rugby Board permission to bring its Maori contingent in 1967 on the grounds that they would not entertain teams of mixed race, and the Kiwis cancelled their All Black tour as a result, fears were raised that Basil’s presence in an England touring party might lead to a similar stand-off. Marylebone Cricket Club, under whose flag England teams toured the world, assured Dennis Howell, the Labour Minister for Sport, that their team to tour South Africa in 1968 would be chosen on merit, and that if any player chosen were to be rejected by the host country, then the projected tour would be abandoned.
All year long, mindful of the probability that Basil would be selected for the winter trip to South Africa, and of the South African government’s possible reaction, the MCC sought to clarify the position. As early as January 1968, the MCC wrote to the South African Cricket Association asking for an assurance that no preconditions would be made over their choice of players. No answer was forthcoming, but as the time approached for the squad to be picked it looked as though the issue would be avoided for the simple reason that although Basil made 87 in the first Ashes Test, by the end of the series he’d been dropped.
Had Roger Prideaux, himself a replacement for Geoff Boycott, not pulled out of the final Test at the Oval with bronchitis, the D’Oliveira affair might never have happened at all. In the event Basil, drafted in at the last moment, made 158 in a rare England victory and what happened next changed the course of sporting history. First, when the squad was announced the day after the Test ended, on 28 August, Basil’s name was not on the list. The selectors and captain Colin Cowdrey insisted that the decision had been made purely on cricketing grounds. Chairman of Selectors Doug Insole attempted to explain by saying that Basil had been considered as a batsman only, and not as an all-rounder. ‘We put him beside the seven batsmen that we had, along with Colin Milburn, whom we also had to leave out with regret.’ But for the majority of observers, their decision smacked of appeasement, of bowing to South Africa’s racial policies.
The stakes were raised when Reg Hayter, Basil’s agent (and later mine), arranged a deal for Basil to cover the tour for the News of the World. Now that would have made interesting copy.
Then, three weeks later on 16 September, Cartwright was forced to withdraw from the squad through injury, Basil was called up to replace him, and the simmering volcano erupted. In South Africa, Vorster claimed Basil’s late inclusion proved that the England selectors had given into pressure from anti-apartheid sympathizers, and he made a speech in Bloemfontein, described by the Daily Mail as ‘crude and boorish’, in which he stated that South Africa was not prepared to receive an England team that had been forced upon them by people ‘with certain political aims’. On 24 September, the tour was cancelled and the first shots in the battle to force South Africa to confront real change had been fired.
As I grew to know Basil over the years, and later specifically as our coach when I moved from Somerset to Worcestershire, I found he took no pleasure in being at the centre of the affair. He was proud of the role he was able to play, but on occasions wondered if the long-term benefit to his people was worth what they were having to suffer as a result of South Africa’s isolation. At that MCC special meeting on 5 December the main speakers criticizing the MCC’s mishandling of the affair were former Test batsman the Reverend David Sheppard, and a young Mike Brearley. Basil never forgot what they did, and he was similarly grateful for the support of friends such as John Arlott and Reg, his agent, who had both helped Basil and his wife Naomi to come to England in the first place. The one thing upon which all commentators were agreed at the time was that Basil kept his dignity throughout. Deep down, I know he was inspired to achieve what he did in the game because of a sense of responsibility he felt to all of the above people, but more significantly to all those fighting for recognition