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Cricket legend D'Oliveira says he was 'set up' by England tour selectors

Ian Burrell,Media Editor
Friday 18 June 2004 19:00 EDT
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One of the finest all-rounders to play cricket for England, Basil D'Oliveira, has broken years of silence by saying that he was "set up" by the sport's authorities who chose not to pick him to tour his native South Africa during the years of apartheid.

One of the finest all-rounders to play cricket for England, Basil D'Oliveira, has broken years of silence by saying that he was "set up" by the sport's authorities who chose not to pick him to tour his native South Africa during the years of apartheid.

D'Oliveira - who was born in Cape Town and classified as "coloured" by the South African government - has spoken publicly for the first time about one of the most controversial episodes in world sport in the 1960s.

D'Oliveira says that despite his high-quality performances on the field, senior members of the game's governing body, the Marylebone Cricket Club, were not prepared to challenge the apartheid regime.

"I think I was set up. I'd given it to them laid out on a plate [but] I was set up. They had a golden opportunity," he says.

Banned by the apartheid laws from playing for the country of his birth, D'Oliveira had travelled to England to realise his cricketing talents, before taking British citizenship and being selected to play Test cricket by Lord's.

It had always been his greatest ambition to return to South Africa to play international cricket and it appeared that he would do so in 1968 after a match-winning performance against Australia in the final test at The Oval. "I had to get this thing back - more than anything I wanted to go to South Africa," he says in atelevision interview to be screened tomorrow by the BBC.

To the astonishment of the cricketing public and the media commentators of the time, D'Oliveira, whose appearance among the England party due to tour South Africa in the winter of 1968 would have been a major embarrassment to the host government, was not selected.

D'Oliveira tells the BBC4 programme, Not Cricket - The Basil D'Oliveira Conspiracy, that he was convinced that his innings of 158 against Australia would guarantee his place on the South African tour.

As he came off the field to a standing ovation he said to himself, "Yes, I'm in again. I've got to be picked."

But to widespread dismay, after a meeting of the selectors that took place 45 minutes after the end of the Australia test, D'Oliveira was left out of the South Africa tour in favour of Tom Cartwright, who according to his former colleague Jack Bannister was not fit to play.

When Cartwright later pulled out and D'Oliveira was picked as his replacement, the South African government cancelled the tour, claiming that the selection process had been tainted with political interference.

Doug Insole, the chairman of the selectors, tells the programme that the original decision not to select D'Oliveira was not political and that any suggestion to the contrary was "totally wide of the mark".

BBC4 claims the selectors were under pressure from the MCC president, Arthur Gilligan, a former member of the British Union of Fascists, not to embarrass the South African government.

The programme claims that the England cricket captain, the late Sir Colin Cowdrey, reneged on a promise to D'Oliveira to support his claim for a place in the touring party. It says that the only selector of five to favour D'Oliveira's selection was the former Test batsman Don Kenyon, and that Cowdrey did not speak up for him. D'Oliveira tells the programme that he believes Cowdrey would have supported him.

The programme traces D'Oliveira's childhood in Cape Town, where his Portuguese ancestry caused him to be classified as non-white.

He became a cricketing phenomenon and captained South Africa's non-white team when it went on tour to Kenya. Later attempts to bring the West Indies Test side to South Africa to take on this non-white side were blocked by the South African government.

D'Oliveira's life changed after he was persuaded by the English cricket commentator John Arlott to take up a professional post playing club cricket in Lancashire. He later played first-class cricket for Worcestershire, where a stand is named in his honour.

The programme traces childhood friends of D'Oliveira's who recall how non-whites had hoped that the cricketer would be allowed to tour with England as a symbol of what others might achieve.

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