But the issue of the scurvy treatment of old sporting heroes is the emotive one today. Ray Gripper, who opened the batting for Zimbabwe for many years, supported this view. "I saw Roy     Maclean not long before he died in 2007," he said. "It was always customary for past Test cricketers — and Roy was one of his country's greatest-ever batsmen — to be invited with their wives to any Test in their home town so they could meet the tourists and chat to their successors in the national team. Roy loved this. Then he was told his wife couldn't have a ticket. He queried this and was basically told that people like himself were now beyond the pale. He was absolutely livid and never attended the Test." The same phrases keep recurring: under Majola the players of that era were "an embarrassment", "were almost punished for being white", "were held personally responsible for apartheid" and so on. Lee Irvine, a former Springbok wicketkeeper-batsman, confirmed that his privileges such as free seats at Tests had also been removed. But what upsets the old Springboks most is that their offers of help are refused. Jimmy Cook and Kevin McKenzie went to Majola to offer their help and were just told: "It's our time now." Irvine similarly offered to coach, speak or mentor the young and was told: "We don't need you." Others have similar stories.

Irvine says: "What upsets me is that there really ought to be a Barry Richards stand and a Graeme Pollock stand, just as other countries commemorate their great cricketers of the past. It's sad for us who were Springboks that even that name has been discarded now [for the Proteas]. And I can tell you of that 1970 team there wasn't a single man in the team who voted for the Nats and apartheid. In 1973 I found a loophole in the law and we staged a multiracial double wicket competition, which hardly pleased the authorities. But of course as soon as we began doing that sort of thing the ANC changed its stance to say, ‘You can't have normal sport in an abnormal society'. They wanted a way of keeping the boycott going even if we went multiracial."

A baneful political influence is still felt in South African cricket. When it was recently proposed that a stand at Newlands cricket ground in Cape Town be named after Basil d'Oliveira this was vetoed on the grounds that d'Oliveira had refused to follow the ANC party line.

As usual with cricketers, it's the symbolic things that count. In the corridor leading to the Long Room at the Wanderers ground in Johannesburg, effectively the headquarters of South African cricket, there was a famous Honours Board on which the names of all the Transvaal players to be selected for their country were inscribed.  Alongside there hung photographs of famous home and touring teams of the past. Once Majola took over CSA the official view taken was that none of the past South African teams had been properly representative, since blacks had been excluded, and that therefore all those teams and all their games had been illegitimate. So the Honours Board and all the old photographs were taken down and vanished. This happened at all the major grounds.