PUSHING BOUNDARIES...
Politics away from cricket take centre stage as Test series is drawn
Paul Edwards continues his look into the Ashes archive with a trip back to the enthralling 1968 series that met a thrilling climax at the Oval, all while the waters were chopping against the looming Basil D’Oliveira affair...
Almost half a century later the photograph of the final dismissal in the 1968 Ashes series retains its dramatic power. All the players on the field are pictured and ten of them are clearly appealing for lbw against John Inverarity, who has moved well outside off-stump, as though suggesting his disengagement from the business. But the umpire, Charlie Eliott, is having none of that. With five minutes to spare, England have won the match and drawn a series bedevilled by rain. So much sawdust has been spread on the wicket and its surrounds that both ends of the pitch seem to have hosted explosions in a talcum powder factory.
In truth, that last afternoon made the 1968 Ashes memorable. Having been set 352 to win, Australia were struggling on 86 for five before a thunderstorm broke over the Oval during the luncheon interval. As if reviving the Dunkirk spirit, spectators helped the ground staff mop up and play resumed in conditions no one would tolerate today. England needed to take five wickets in 75 minutes, but over half that time had elapsed before Basil D’Oliveira brought one back off the seam to bowl Barry Jarman, who, like Inverarity half an hour later, was playing no stroke.
Then Derek Underwood, whose slow-medium deliveries were often fiendishly unplayable on a drying wicket, took two wickets in an over and set up his famous dismissal of Inverarity. Accompanying the rapidly rewritten pieces in the next day’s papers were pictures of the punters clearing water off the outfield, and also of Underwood, who had taken seven for 50, waving to the crowd from the Oval balcony.
But let us return to that photograph for a moment. The one player not obviously appealing for leg before is D’Oliveira, who had earlier greeted his vital dismissal of Jarman with nothing more extrovert than a hitch of the flannels. No one, however, should interpret this behaviour as suggesting a lack of commitment to England’s cause. On the contrary, no player in the match had more reason to be grateful for the chance to play Test cricket than D’Oliveira. He could, though, have been forgiven during that particular game if his mind had wandered back to his childhood in Cape Town, to matches played on matting wickets in bleak scrubland and to his seemingly fanciful hopes of being a professional cricketer. South Africa may have been a sports-mad country in those years, but it catered only for the ambitions of its white minority.
Just occasionally, you see, even an Ashes series is transcended by its contexts. The Bodyline tour eventually smacked of creaking colonialism as much as stopping Bradman; the Packer Affair, which directly affected at least two sets of matches, was about the media business and the growing power of international players. Then in 1968, one of the less eventful Anglo-Australian series was followed by a controversy which eventually dwarfed both Douglas Jardine’s obsession and World Series Cricket. It began on the field, though, with a very fine hundred…
Four days before Underwood savoured the cheers of the crowd, D’Oliveira had sat alone on that same Oval balcony. It was early in the evening and he believed he had just played the innings that would earn him a place on the winter tour to South Africa. He would thereby achieve the ambition of playing Test cricket in the country where he had been a third-class citizen. It was something so wonderful that it had once seemed absurd even to trifle with the possibility that it might occur.
That Friday afternoon, D’Oliveira had made 158 against Australia. Although dropped by wicketkeeper Jarman off the leg-spin of Ian Chappell when only 31, he had struck the ball with rare command for the remainder of his innings. “D’Oliveira set himself on automatic steering,” wrote John Woodcock in The Times. “He batted until five o’clock with the minimum of effort, never a hair or a nerve out of place. He was impassive and assured; his best shots were powerful but seldom physical.”
D’Oliveira could do nothing to help his team regain the Ashes. Having lost the first Test at Old Trafford, England had enjoyed the best of two out of the next three matches but had been frustrated by the weather in what was a damp season.
The youngest Australian side ever to visit England was to return home after a four-month tour comprising 29 games with their prime objective achieved. Their skipper, Bill Lawry, who made his side’s only century of the series in the Oval Test, could just about tolerate defeats to Yorkshire and Glamorgan when set beside the retention of the Urn which had been won in Australia nearly ten years previously. The best Colin Cowdrey’s players could get out of their summer was parity.
But D’Oliveira’s thoughts that unusually mellow Friday evening did not centre on the settled destiny of the Ashes or even the possibility that England might level the series. Rather he was pondering the possibility that he might play for England in South Africa.
D’Oliveira had always wanted to be a professional cricketer, but the fact that he was by far the best non-white player in his homeland could not help him achieve his goal in the era of Apartheid. So he wrote letters to those he thought might help him and in 1960 gained a professional contract to play for Middleton. The folk at the Central Lancashire League club made him welcome; they treated him and his wife Naomi as friends; he learned how to bat on slow English wickets.
By 1964 he was playing for Worcestershire and in 1966 he made his Test debut for England. Now, two years later and in the final Test of the summer, he had been recalled to the side and had taken another opportunity. That evening D’Oliveira had every reason to think he would soon be playing Test cricket in a country where racial discrimination was government policy.
“It had been the most satisfying innings of his life,” writes Peter Oborne in his brilliant biography. “D’Oliveira felt a deep inner peace, the kind which a man is lucky to experience three or four times in his life.”
Everyone at the Oval that Friday afternoon was alert to the consequences of D’Oliveira’s century. “Well done, Bas, it’ll be interesting to see what happens,” mused the Australian leg-spinner Gleeson, off whom he had nudged the single that took him to his hundred. Umpire Elliott put matters more directly. “Oh Christ, you’ve set the cat among the pigeons now,” he said. Much later, E W Swanton was to describe Jarman’s missed chance as “the most fateful drop in cricket history”.
As it turned out, there was never any chance of D’Oliveira playing in South Africa. As Oborne diligently records, earlier that day a message had been sent to Lord’s from a representative of the government in Pretoria. “I can’t get hold of the MCC secretary, so will you take a message to the selectors,” it read. “Tell them that if today’s centurion is picked the tour will be off.”
The message was conveyed to the selectors but we will never know its precise effect on their deliberations. The minutes of the meeting to choose
The youngest Australian side to visit England was to return home after a four-month tour comprising 29 games with their objective achieved
the tour party are missing. Nevertheless, the South African government’s delight and relief when D’Oliveira’s name was not of the 16 players chosen was as great as the furore his omission caused in England. Three weeks later, though,
Tom Cartwright failed a fitness test and D’Oliveira was named as his replacement.
The government in Pretoria immediately withdrew its invitation, claiming his selection was a consequence of pressure from the anti-Apartheid movement. The tour was cancelled and South Africa began its grim trek towards sporting isolation. Tests between the two countries were not to resume until 1994, by which time Nelson Mandela was president of the rainbow nation.
“No other cricket innings has changed history. This one did,” writes Oborne of D’Oliveira’s century at the Oval. “No other innings, to put the matter simply, has done anything like so much good.”
It is, of course, deliciously ironic that the most important century in Ashes history did not decide which country held the mythical Urn. It is something of a corrective to those who have turned a keen sporting rivalry into a blood-feud. And yet even as one is tempted to trot out the view that cricket is a game, Basil D’Oliveira’s career reminds one what this game could mean. At the same time as we decide we take cricket too seriously, we are reminded that there are times when we do not take it seriously enough.
“I have never regarded cricket as a branch of religion,” wrote Raymond Robertson Glasgow. “I have met, and somehow survived, many of its blindest worshippers. I have never believed that cricket can hold Empires together, or that cricketers chosen to represent their country in distant parts should be told, year after year, that they are Ambassadors. If they are, I can think of some damned odd ones.”
“Oh quite,” one replies, but the words are barely spoken before one thinks about the issues of class, race and nationhood raised by the image of a 37-year-old cricketer from Signal Hill in Cape Town sitting on the Oval balcony in the gentle sunlight of an August evening.