BATTING FOR OUR FORGOTTEN CRICKETERS
Local historians are championing the rich history of black cricket players in SA. It’s a story we should all know about
team were Garth le Roux, the fast bowler who was among Kerry Packer’s first recruits to World Series Cricket, and youthful Kepler Wessels and Adrian
Kuiper. He made runs regularly as a toporder batsman for Cambridge University while obtaining a doctorate. In 1980 he made the highest score of 74 for Combined
Universities at Edgbaston against Warwickshire’s England fast bowlers Bob Willis and
Gladstone Small.
Odendaal’s dreams of playing cricket in
England began as a 13-year-old growing up in
Queenstown and being coached by a Queens
High old boy, Tony Greig, who would later captain
England. Even before the cricket journey had been achieved, the political one had begun in the 1970s.
As a 23-year-old student he published his first book,
Cricket in Isolation, “a lament for a great SA team being unfairly excluded from cricket”.
“In the very process of writing that, I came to realise that cricket’s problem was located in the heart of the system and that the system needed to be changed, and that the [sports] boycott was actually the right thing.” Correcting the The History of
The four books, for the first time, cover all cricket in SA from 1795 to 2016 and acknowledge the most neglected part of the history: games played by black Africans. The books debunk ancient myths about black people not having a cricket culture and tradition, and that cricket was only a white man’s game.
Odendaal is no ivory-tower academic. At Stellenbosch University in the 1970s he followed Eddie Barlow and Peter Kirsten as captain of the first XI and led the team to its first premier league title in 10 years. Among the players in that