"Part of the problem," says Ray White, "is that if after 1992 anyone said, ‘We ought to look after our old Test cricketers', others would, quite reasonably, say, ‘What about the black cricketers of that era who ought to have been in the team but weren't picked because of apartheid?' There was no way to settle that. How do you decide retrospectively who might have been picked decades before? It made everything rather insoluble, so it was just easier to draw a line and forget about the former era and its greats." 

Yet the oddity always was that cricketers usually got along as cricketers. "When I first came across Basil d'Oliveira I thought he might dislike me on principle," says Irvine, who was playing for Essex at the time. "I would even have understood that. But he was much too nice a man. Dolly and I became great pals."

It is certainly very striking that none of the greats of that era — not even the incomparable Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock — has ever been asked to coach or advise the current teams in any way — a bit like Australia ostracising Bradman. Similarly, the great fast bowler Allan Donald ("White Lightning") was long ignored as a bowling coach and got the South African job only after he had been offered that post by both England and New Zealand. This ostracism extends even into the media. Supersport, the main TV sports channel, got rid of Richards as a commentator after he was said to have spoken out of turn on the vexed subject of racial quotas in the team. Similarly, the SABC got rid of Irvine as a commentator, replacing him with someone with no experience of first-class cricket. "I have no doubt that political influence was brought to bear," says Irvine. Richards says much the same of his arbitrary banning from the airwaves. Instead, broadcasters now rely on Mike Haysman (ex-Australia) and Robin Jackman (ex-England), even though the latter played in the sanctions-busting "pirate" cricket tours of the apartheid era. Kepler Wessels is allowed his say, although he also played for Australia, because he was still captain of South Africa when the team re-entered world cricket in 1992. Clive Rice, perhaps the world's greatest all-rounder in the 1970s and 1980s, has effectively been banned from all South African media because he is a vocal opponent of affirmative action in cricket. This is a completely taboo subject on South African radio and TV commentary although everyone knows it has been a major factor in team selection. The result is sometimes comic, as when a visiting foreign commentator like Geoffrey Boycott brings the subject up on air, only to be met by a steely silence from his colleagues. Rice has, typically, made some withering comments about this political censorship of cricket commentary.