Barry Richards is more indignant. "Not once have I ever been invited to a South African cricket function and they have even taken our numbers away from us [every player gets a number when first selected]. They just started the numbers from one all over again in 1992, which is to say we are no longer recognised as having played for our country. And the fact is that there's nothing that annoys the present administrators so much as the kudos of that great 1970 team. SAB-Miller, one of the key sponsors, are always trying to involve people like me and Graeme [Pollock] and Procky [Procter] but the administrators won't have it: they even threaten SAB that they'd call for a boycott of their products if they went ahead and invited us. It's just absolute revenge. I'm entirely in sympathy with disadvantaged cricketers but our guys were disadvantaged in their prime by not being allowed to play the West Indies, India and Pakistan and we're sure as hell disadvantaged again now."

This certainly seems to be true. Mike Procter took off for England for this summer's  Proteas tour in the hope of picking up speaking engagements and other commitments. "I have to seek work there because no one will offer me work at home," he says. Graeme Pollock is in the same boat, negotiating to go to India to do speaking functions at much lower rates than those taken for granted by the likes of the top Indian batsmen Sashin Tendulkar or Rahul Dravid. Pollock, now 68, faces an uncertain financial future in old age. It is an amazing situation: in all Test cricket history only two men average over 60-Bradman and Pollock, iconic status which, one would have thought, would guarantee financial security. But the problem is, again, that he played in the apartheid era. "Naas Botha, the rugby player, wanted to start a Hall of Fame for Springbok sportsmen but Cricket South Africa would have nothing to do with it because it would have meant commemorating us," he says. "The fact that we used to argue for selection on merit, not on racial grounds, doesn't matter. The current players would, I know, like to have people like Barry [Richards] and Mike [Procter] involved but they have to be careful too: their political situation is still difficult. So it's best that they just concentrate on making runs and taking wickets. I entirely accept that. The real tragedy is that all South African cricketers have been walking a political tightrope for 50 years and they still are."

For the last few years South African cricket has been paralysed by the Majola affair — and even now Majola insists that his supension is temporary and that he will be back. Much of the trouble derives from the fact that there's serious money in cricket these days. Back in the apartheid era Dr Ali Bacher, for long the South African Cricket Union supremo, made famously liberal use of his chequebook to bring "pirate" foreign teams to play in South Africa, effectively a sort of sanctions-busting campaign. Even now, some bitterness lingers over the pirate tours: Viv Richards, for example, said he would die sooner than accept Bacher's money (which meant that Ian Botham quickly said the same) while West Indian players like Alvin Kallicharran, who did accept Bacher's money, have still not been fully forgiven either in the West Indies or black South Africa. As with so many others, Bacher did a quick 180-degree somersault when the politics changed and became an outspoken advocate of picking more than half the national team from blacks. Indeed, Bacher was so determined to win political applause with such promises that he left his successors an impossible job. Although many mixed-race Coloureds and several Asians have made it into the team, interest and participation in cricket by black South Africans has grown far more slowly.