The best-known photograph from the 1992 World Cup shows Jonty Rhodes hurtling into the stumps at The Gabba to run-out Inzamam-ul-Haq. It flashed around the world, making Rhodes a household name and serving notice that South Africa, the prodigal sons of world cricket, were well and truly back.
Another picture, however, taken a couple of weeks earlier had greater resonance for South Africans. At the Sydney Cricket Ground, a tearful Steve Tshwete hugs a faintly bemused-looking Kepler Wessels after South Africa had hammered the hosts and outright favourites Australia by nine wickets in their first World Cup match.
The symbolism could have escaped no one: the former Robben Island prisoner and African National Congress politician embracing the migrant Afrikaner in mutual celebration of a South African triumph. Who would have believed it just three years earlier?
It is a great sadness that Tshwete will not be in the VIP seats at the opening match of next year’s World Cup at Newlands, nor at the final at the Wanderers. Perhaps the single most important figure in the unification of South African cricket, Tshwete tugged, shoved and battered the United Cricket Board (UCB) into shape.
Tshwete was at Lord’s in 1991 with Ali Bacher and Geoff Dakin, the first president of the UCB, arguing for South Africa to be readmitted to the International Cricket Council. He urged the UCB to undertake the short tour of India later that year and he used his influence ? and the moral authority of Nelson Mandela ? to get South Africa into the 1992 World Cup.
There was reciprocation. The South Africans publicly endorsed the ”yes” vote in the referendum that took place later during the tournament and paved the way for the 1994 elections. There was a measure of public relations in this, but after years of isolation South Africa’s participation was a way of showing the benefits of rejoining the world.
Tshwete’s legacy to South African cricket is a game that, by and large, thrives. Which is not to say that it has not occasionally veered off course, but the formation of the National Cricket Committee last weekend is recognition, for the moment at least, that there are some problems that need cricketing solutions.
UCB president Percy Sonn has scoffed at the notion that his intervention in the Sydney Test team divided the cricketing public. He is mistaken. He needs to get out of the presidential suites and into the stands and the queues more often. Any action that splits the cricket community into black and white camps has to be cause for deep concern.
But Sonn, at least, has admitted that it hurt deeply to be beaten, and beaten so badly, by Australia. And the committee is a step towards using cricketing minds, rather than those of an administrative or political bent, to solve the problems on the field.
Because of its origins, the UCB is an occasionally awkward animal. The old guard of white administrators has mostly been swept away, but it may be a few years yet before ex-players, with experience at international level and of the game in other countries, start turning their minds to administration.
In the meantime, the cricket committee might help to overcome the gap between the players and administrators without first-hand experience of the game at the highest levels. UCB chief executive Gerald Majola is driving this process and it’s not hard to imagine that Tshwete would have thoroughly approved his initiative and determination.
The goal is to win the World Cup and despite the setbacks of the summer, this remains an achievable ambition. And if South Africa do triumph in the final it seems a fair bet that, wherever he is, Tshwete will be hugging everyone in sight.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa.