Although today’s players tire of hearing this, Ali Bacher’s 1970 team was the most powerful side to have represented South Africa. Blessed with two bona fide batting geniuses in Graeme Pollock and Barry Richard and the extraordinary all-round gifts of Mike Procter, the side was crammed with players who would have stood out in any era — Eddie Barlow, Tiger Lance, Denis Lindsay and Lee Irvine, to name but a few.
Great teams are made up of great players, but great players don’t necessarily make great teams. The 1970 side, however, did not come together by accident. It was the
culmination of a long post-war haul for South African cricket, a period when the sport sought and finally discovered an identity. The quest and emergence of this particularly South African way of playing cricket is the theme of Luke Alfred’s Testing Times.
Alfred, who has written about cricket for the Sunday Independent and The Star and now works for the Sunday Times, explores South Africa’s post-war adventures, starting, more or less, with South Africa’s 1947 tour to England and taking his story through to the 1963/64 tour to Australia.
Of course, Test cricket through this era was the preserve of white cricketers. The injustice of apartheid hardly needs to be repeated, but Alfred’s concern is that the exploits, achievements and failures of the past need to be acknowledged. In his own words: ”Why should South Africans be so committed to the willed
amnesia that neglects the cricket played before 1991/92?
”We are committed to amnesia because dismissing the cricket played before 1992 brings with it a parallel series of dismissals. In forgetting the cricket played we
forget about history; in forgetting about history we forget about politics — most notably apartheid — and in forgetting about politics we can, in a sense, forget about the pain of the past.”
Alfred believes that cricket is a game of tradition and that we ignore or dismiss these traditions at our peril. Perhaps the essential difference between the way South Africans and Australians play cricket today is that the Australians respect and even revere their past. Why is it that even without Shane Warne, Australia have still been able to field two wrist-spinners, Stuart MacGill and Brad Hogg, against the West Indies? The answer is simply that Australian cricket has a great tradition of wrist-spinners, going back through Benaud and O’Reilly to Grimmett.
Australian cricketers grow up believing that wrist-spinners win matches and they accept this without qualification.
In the past two or three years, as part of the transformation of South African cricket, a series of books has been commissioned and published around the country dealing with the history of black cricket, among them Blacks in Whites, More than a Game and, most recently, Across the Great Divide — all are intended to provide a body of literature where none existed before.
A more comprehensive work on the complete history of all South African cricket has been commissioned from André Odendaal, the former curator of the Robben Island museum. In the meantime, Alfred’s work complements the industry of the black cricket historians.
He stops with the 1963/64 tour to Australia because he has employed as background South Africa’s links with Empire and Commonwealth, including the part played by South African cricketers during World War II, fighting for the Allied forces.
I would have liked Alfred to have taken the story through to the 1965 tour of England, the last until 1994, but that’s a small criticism.