Unrepentant rebels

What is somewhat dispiriting about Colville's investigations is how many of the rebels remain unrepentant. At least John Emburey admits he went solely for the money. Colin Croft, on the other hand, casts himself and his fellow rebel West Indian side as cricketing Rosa Parks, there to show racist South Africans that the black man could play cricket as well as the white and thus helping to accelerate the end of apartheid. Perhaps Croft should talk to Peter Oborne, the author of the definitive book about the D'Oliveira case, who tells Colville that the tourists "should never be allowed to forget they were giving comfort to a wicked, barbarous regime".

But it was Gatting who finally demonstrated how far a cricketer's moral compass can go awry. By 1990, when he led a tour to South Africa, no one could claim ignorance. The moment he signed up, Gatting was subject to unrelenting opprobrium. At a press conference, he was hectored by a journalist who wondered how he would spend his blood money ("fancy a yacht, Mr Gatting?"). Unlike even the West Indies team whose presence was greeted largely by sullen disappointment among black South Africans, Gatting arrived in Pietermaritzberg into an organised maelstrom of demonstration. Indeed, his very presence highlighted the growing absurdity of a dying regime: a month after his tour was abandoned in embarrassment, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the swift gallop to normality was unleashed