5

Annus Mirabilis 1970–71

‘Don’t fail to see this young man bat when he comes here.’

Sir Donald Bradman

AN annus mirabilis is a year of wonders. If it is stretching mathematics to refer to the period of Barry Richards’s career from January 1970 to March 1971 as such, it certainly does not stretch the truth. His first-class career spanned the years from 1964 to 1983 but he was at his best, he believes, from 1968 to 1975, when his hunger was at its sharpest and his ambition burned brightest. In the months leading up to the greatly anticipated arrival of the Australians in the 1969/70 season, Barry was in the form of his life. He had returned to Durban on the back of two glittering seasons for Hampshire, scoring 2,314 runs at an average of 48.21 in 1968 and 1,440 runs the following year, curtailed by injury, at 57.60.

A year of dramatic change in the English first-class game had made up 1968. For the first time, each county had been allowed to sign one overseas player on immediate registration and in the scramble to secure the biggest names in the game, Hampshire’s acquisition of the hitherto largely unknown Barry Richards had initially slipped below the radar. But not for long. After a quiet start for his new county, once the sun emerged from bleak, early summer clouds, he took the championship by storm. Promoted to open the innings, he scored 130 and 104 not out against Northamptonshire, followed by 206 against Nottinghamshire, and never looked back.

Wisden chose him as one of its five cricketers of the year. It was a hugely prestigious award with an accolade from the editor that must have been burning Barry’s ears as the printing presses were whirring and clanking. Wisden’s citation belongs to a later chapter but it is as well to bring to mind the impact the young Richards was making on the game worldwide and how benignly the cricketing gods were smiling upon him during this period of his life. ‘Garry Sobers apart, none of the new overseas players in county cricket made a greater impact than Barry Anderson Richards,’ wrote the editor. He then went on to make two observations, one uncannily prescient and the other tragically mistaken. ‘Keen as he is on the game, Richards shares the general opinion of overseas players that there is far too much cricket played in England.’ He even quoted Barry’s own words, ‘I woke up on some mornings and said to myself, surely not another day’s cricket!’ You should have heard what he was saying by 1976 as he pulled back the curtains every morning.

The other pronouncement brings a lump to the throat as you read it, knowing how things subsequently turned out. ‘Richards’s horizons seem limitless and it will be fascinating to see how far his talents will take him. Few, anywhere in the world, have his possibilities.’

The only possibility that concerned him as he took guard once again for Natal at the start of the 1969/70 season was selection for the Test side against the visiting Australians. It was more of a probability than a possibility. There was scarcely a cricket follower in the country who did not expect that he would be in the team and if there was any vestige of doubt, it was swept aside by his form leading up to the Tests. It was nothing short of scintillating: 100 v Western Province, 41 v South African Universities XI, 110 not out v Eastern Province, 42 v Transvaal, 169 v Rhodesia. ‘I was in pretty good nick. I scored four hundreds in six innings,’ he said, reminding me of the one-day competition, the Gillette Cup, as well. Be honest, what was your reaction when the team for the first Test was announced? ‘No great surprise really. Many people felt that I should have been picked in 1967 anyway.’ And with the weight of runs supporting his inclusion, he would have had to have kicked something much bigger than a flowerpot to have been excluded again. No doubt with a broken foot to boot. Sensibly, he gave nightclubs a wide berth in the weeks leading up to the opening Test.

Was it an emotional moment when you were presented with your green Springbok cap? ‘Obviously it was special to me. But there was no song and dance about it, no special ceremony. Don’t forget there were three or four of us making our debuts that game. I think it was Trevor Goddard who gave it to me.’ That would have been fitting: both team-mates for Natal but from different generations, the grizzled veteran passing the sword of battle on to the young warrior. Barry seized it eagerly. It was high time. The first clash took place in Cape Town. He travelled down several days beforehand for practice in the nets, which were good at Newlands. ‘One side used them in the morning, the other in the afternoon,’ he answered matter-of-factly to my query about the routine before a Test match.

How were you welcomed into the side? ‘No problems at all. We all knew each other. We’d been colleagues and opponents in the Currie Cup, so I was no stranger.’ Ali Bacher was captain. How did you rate him? ‘An excellent man manager. He knew how to press all the right buttons for each different personality in the side.’ Lee Irvine agreed wholeheartedly. ‘There were one or two potential troublemakers in that team but he handled them well. Look, the Pollocks, Barlow, Goddard – a former captain – they were all experienced Test players and all had strong personalities. But he got all of us to gel.’ In fact, Irvine went on to say that appointing Bacher as captain was a ‘masterstroke’ by the selectors because he was by no means the only candidate. By all accounts there had been much discussion before the decision was made. Goddard had the experience and Barlow the personality in most people’s minds, including his own. ‘Eddie was a great motivator of the youngsters,’ Irvine believed, ‘but how he was going to cope with the Pollocks, for example, was a moot point.’ So, the right choice was made and all fell into line. ‘Eddie was an outgoing, ebullient sort of character,’ Irvine went on, ‘Ali, by contrast, was very self-effacing, a bit of a loner, really. But that’s no bad thing for a captain. He shouldn’t just be one of the boys.’

But how was he tactically? Barry answered, ‘Tactically very astute. But over the years I became more and more convinced that captaincy isn’t really about setting fancy fields. Well, not at this level anyway. Everyone knew his job, what he had to do. What Ali was good at was creating the right atmosphere for all of us to have the confidence to go out there and show our talent.’ Attention to detail is another quality of a good captain, Barry might have added. Bacher was meticulous in the manner in which he prepared his team. For example, he made sure that he roomed with one of the new boys and his vice-captain, Eddie Barlow, with another. Barry’s turn for the prefectorial guardianship was in Durban during the second Test. Lee Irvine remembers being roomed with Barlow and getting the lowdown on Test cricket well into the night before the game. ‘So much so,’ said Irvine, ‘I was so wired up that I couldn’t sleep while Eddie was snoring away.’

The South African public had been starved of international cricket – the last series had been against Bobby Simpson’s Australian side three years previously – and there was huge interest and anticipation before the first Test. ‘The bottom line,’ said Irvine, ‘was that they came as world champions, in all but name, and had a reputation as a great team.’ Their record in their last four series, against England, India, West Indies and India in that order, would seem to have borne out this view. Bill Lawry, their captain, was a seasoned and battle-hardened veteran, as tough as teak. He announced, on their arrival, that he had every confidence in his batting line-up of Stackpole, Walters, Redpath and Sheahan, as well as Ian Chappell, ‘The best young batsman in the world.’ Hmm, Barry might have wanted to have something to say about that. Lawry also pointed to Graham McKenzie, the youngest bowler ever to take 100 and 200 Test wickets, who would spearhead the attack, supported by the dependable Alan Connolly, a proven Test spinner in Ashley Mallett and of course the ‘mystery bowler’, John Gleeson, whose name was on everybody’s lips. The South Africans were keen, naturally, but young, largely untried and short of Test match experience. The challenge was enormous.

Unlike Barry, Lee Irvine was not at all sure of his place in the team. An obvious rival was Colin Bland, who had an exceptional Test record and was of course the best fielder in the world of his era, some would argue of any era. But he had a dodgy knee. The selectors looked at the swollen joint with dismay after a long innings in the Currie Cup and there and then came to the judgement that he was not fit for a five-day match. So Irvine, Barry’s friend and team-mate at Durban High, also received his green Springbok cap that morning.

Barry admitted to being nervous as he took guard at 11am on the first day at Newlands. As well he might. Every batsman battles with his nerves before an innings, especially one as significant as this. If you don’t feel nervous, you don’t care and Barry cared all right. He noticed that his opening partner, Trevor Goddard, playing in his 39th Test, was even more nervous. Test series came around infrequently for South Africans and much was at stake. Against the new ball attack of McKenzie and Connolly, Barry started with uncommon circumspection, taking 20 minutes to get off the mark. Eventually, a square drive for four off Connolly saw him on his way and he started to relax, believing that now the hard work had been done, he ought to settle in for a large score. But he had relaxed too early and a loose shot off Connolly took the inside edge and he was bowled for 29. ‘I let my guard down,’ he confessed. ‘What is the pass mark for your first Test? Thirty-odd? Subconsciously, I guess I thought I’d made enough not to get dropped.’

All the other batsmen made good starts but only Eddie Barlow prospered. But not without controversy, it has to be said. Irvine was batting with him at the time. ‘Eddie went on the hook, gloved it and was caught. But the umpire, Billy Wade, as nice a fellow as you could ever wish to meet, gave him not out. Of course, the Aussies went berserk. Lawry threw his cap on the ground and stamped on it and the rest of the Australians surrounded Eddie, all swearing at him. When Eddie “politely” suggested that it might not be a bad idea for them to get back to their positions to continue the game, the language became worse.’ Eventually, the match did resume. Barlow, then on 66, went on to make 127, the backbone of a total of 382. Reasonable but not out of sight.

Australia’s reply was disastrous and set the tone, in fact, for a series that seemed to go from bad to worse. The wicket at Newlands held no terrors, if being a little on the slow side, but their vaunted batting found different ways to get out and the total of 164 was patently inadequate. Chappell, for one, was unlucky, Irvine admitted. ‘He hooked at a bouncer from Peter Pollock and really middled it. I was fielding at squarish leg gully and instinctively put up my hands and parried it up into the air. Chevalier, running behind me, caught it.’ That was how it went, Test after Test, the South Africans taking miraculous catches and the Australians dropping even the simplest. Surely Bacher would enforce the follow-on and subject the visitors to more of the same. But no, the wicket had started to turn and with the ‘mystery’ spinner, Johnny Gleeson, proving to be something of a handful in the first innings, with no luck, it has to be said, Bacher sensibly avoided the possibility of having to chase a total, no matter how meagre, on a wearing wicket in the fourth innings. The instructions were clear – bat again, pile on the runs and destroy them psychologically.

In his second innings, Barry was more relaxed but again he fell foul of a moment’s loss of concentration and was out caught behind off Connolly for 32. Connolly got you twice in the match. Was there a problem facing him? There was no problem facing Connolly, and later scores would seem to bear this out, but he was prepared to admit that he was a better bowler than given credit for and in fact was one of the very few in the Australian side to do himself justice on the tour. ‘It was his change of pace that set him apart from the others. He bowled well throughout the series but really, I had only myself to blame for two cheap dismissals.’ In their haste to make quick runs, several South Africans were equally carelessly dismissed but their total of 232 meant that Australia had to score a mammoth 440 to win on a wicket starting to take considerable turn.

In truth, all they could hope for was to grind it out for a draw but though the Aussies’ resistance was stiffer than in the first innings, South Africa were not to be denied and Australia were dismissed 170 runs short. I see you made a significant contribution in the charge for victory. He laughed. ‘My one and only Test wicket, Johnny Gleeson, poor fellow. He was deceived by my mystery ball and was yorked!’ Delighted though they were by their victory in their first Test for three years, the South African team were not wholly satisfied by their performance. ‘Prockie bowled well in the second innings and of course Barlow made the big score around which our first innings was built. But there had been apprehension in the team. We were a bit stiff, as if the wheels weren’t properly oiled.’ All one can say is that, come the second Test, the wheels had been given lashings of oil and were turning very smoothly.

How did the Aussies take their defeat? ‘On the whole, they were a pretty decent bunch. We went into their dressing room afterwards, as you usually did, and Western Province put on a drinks party after the game.’ He went on to record his surprise to discover that this was not custom and practice in the English game when he went over to play for Hampshire but he ascribed this to two reasons. The first was that the game was fully professional. ‘It was your job, every day of the week. And at the close of play, you knocked off and went home.’ And the second was that he felt that South Africans, with their colonial past, had much more in common with the Aussies than with the English. ‘Enemies on the field and friends off it. Except perhaps for Barlow.’

How come? ‘Bunter’ Barlow? I always thought that he was a cheerful, no-nonsense sort of chap. ‘He was really pumped for this game, on his home turf. He would go and have a beer with them but he remained guarded, not wanting to be too friendly. He wanted to keep up the pressure. The series wasn’t yet won.’ Was there much sledging on the pitch? Barry grinned. ‘Plenty. Don’t forget, there was no TV, no close-ups. And of course no stump microphones to pick up the unguarded comments.’ So what was said? ‘Obviously, the weakest or the most vulnerable would be targeted. And you’d get a lot of stick if you played a loose shot or didn’t walk or something like that.’ Stick for not walking? Come on, the Aussies invented the innocent look and the crafty tap of the imaginary divot. We both agreed on that one. Except that Lee Irvine recounted a story from the series that might perhaps put the Australians in a different light. And believe it or not, it featured Ian Chappell and might go a long way to explaining his subsequent abrasive attitude on the field to his opponents. ‘I forget which innings but Chappell was caught by Lance in the gully. He asked Lance whether he had caught it. Lance said yes, so Chappell accepted his word and off he went. I was fielding at cover and I’d had a good sight of the ball. “Tiger,” I said. “That was a bump ball.” Tiger replied, “I know. But he didn’t ask me whether it had bounced before I caught it, did he?”’ I burst out laughing. ‘Besides,’ Barry added, ‘it was much worse in the Currie Cup. We all knew each other and how to wind each other up.’ While he was at Hampshire, I never remember Barry being wound up when he was at the crease. By then, I guess, everybody had worked out that it was a futile, not to say foolhardy, tactic anyway.

The anticipation and excitement before the second Test at Kingsmead was even more electric than it was at Cape Town, Barry reckoned. For him, it was always going to be a special occasion because it was at his home ground. Were your parents at the match? ‘They were. But I didn’t manage to see much of them during the game because I stayed in the team hotel with the rest of the lads. Ali shared a room with me.’ All part of the best laid plans of a captain who left no stone unturned in his quest to keep the Australians on the back foot.

For some reason, Barry felt less nervous as he walked out to bat with Trevor Goddard than he had at Newlands. Perhaps it was because he was playing in familiar surroundings, in front of his home crowd. Perhaps he felt a little more settled in the side, now that he had experienced Test cricket for the first time and was confident he could, and would, cut the mustard at this level. Never mind ‘this level’, it was at a level more elevated than most had ever witnessed that he batted that morning. Nobody who was there has ever forgotten it. ‘I started well and got on a roll,’ was his bland assessment of how things went, as if the sheer majesty of his innings were an everyday occurrence. Even the bald facts give some clue as to the mastery he exerted over the Australian attack; he raced to 94 before lunch and was out later in the afternoon for 140 off only 164 balls.

Wisden preferred more vivid prose, calling it ‘an exhibition of technical brilliance’ in which ‘the only false stroke in his three hour innings was his last.’ Others remember it as a spectacle of outrageously brilliant strokeplay. Irvine called it ‘awesome’. Barry very nearly made history by reaching his hundred before lunch. Only three players had performed the feat on the first day of a Test match and all were Australians, Trumper, Macartney and Bradman. No South African. ‘And no Pommie,’ Barry reminded me wryly, as if such a thing were unthinkable.

And to the present day, only Majid Khan of Pakistan has added his name to that illustrious list. So you can imagine the rising feverishness of a packed Kingsmead ground, on a gloriously sunny day, as Barry thumped and smashed his way closer to the landmark. Bacher was batting with him and it was ten minutes to one and lunch. ‘He was six runs short,’ Bacher recalled years later. ‘So, in an attempt to give him the strike, I rushed out of the crease against Connolly and was duly bowled.’ Around his legs. ‘Barry should have got it,’ John Traicos, whose debut this was while still a student at Natal University, ‘and could easily have got it had not the Australians employed some outrageously slow tactics.’ Indeed, they only bowled three overs in the last 20 minutes. ‘Bill Lawry, the captain, was furious at what was happening,’ said Barry, with more equanimity than he must have felt at the time. ‘He didn’t want to be the captain of the side that let a 24-year-old, playing in his second Test, score a hundred before lunch.’ And just to make sure, Lawry suddenly discovered a problem with his bootlaces, bending down to do them up, then to undo them and to do them up again. The ploy succeeded. Barry was stranded on 94 as the umpires removed the bails and they all trooped off to have lunch. To this day, I have never encountered anyone from a country that does not play cricket who can get his head round the fact that the game stops so that the players can have lunch. Only in England, they say. Well, not quite – in South Africa too. What did you have to eat, Barry? Was it a bowl of fruit without the juice? ‘The choice was salad or curry and rice. As I was batting, I had a bit of salad. No one squeezed out the lettuce, as I recall.’

If it was salad for lunch, his partner after the break, Graeme Pollock, must have had the same. It is difficult to describe adequately what took place that afternoon at Kingsmead. At the time, the headline ‘The Golden Hour’ was coined and later entered South African cricket folklore. If the crowd had thought that morning that they had been privileged to witness before lunch a display of batting the like of which they would be lucky to see again in their lifetime, they were mistaken. In fact, they had only to wait for 40 minutes. In one hour after lunch, Richards and Pollock put on 103 runs in an exhibition of inspired strokeplay that had everyone reaching for the thesaurus. I could reach for mine but I think I shall leave it to others to try to put into words what they had been watching. Lee Irvine said that it was ‘unforgettable – one of the greatest partnerships of all time’.

John Traicos wrote to me in these words, ‘Richards and Pollock thrashed the Australian bowling in what is often described as an hour of classic batsmanship, as the established maestro (Pollock) was determined not to be outdone by the young genius (Richards). The straight drives, all along the ground, were an exceptional feature of the partnership.’ Ali Bacher, also watching from the players’ balcony, reminisced in these words, ‘I don’t think this country has ever again seen batting like we saw that day.’ Wisden recorded it as ‘a glittering and technically perfect passage of batting.’ Paul Sheahan, one of the helpless Australian fielders, took up this theme of the young gun and the older assassin, ‘It was as if Pollock was saying, “You’ve seen the apprentice. Now look at the master.”’ Ian Chappell, a young firebrand in the Australian team at the time, put it more bluntly, ‘I remember telling Stackie [Keith Stackpole], “We’ve got a problem here, mate. This bastard [Pollock] is going to see how many Barry gets and then he’s going to double it.” Prophetic words. That is precisely what Pollock did, but more of his innings later. The Australian captain, Bill Lawry, never one to give praise lightly, admitted afterwards, ‘Never have I seen the ball hit with such power by two players at the same time.’

And what of Barry’s recollection? ‘It was just one of those days when everything clicked, you know, when everything hits the middle of the bat.’ Then a thought struck me. Apart from their supreme skills with the bat, both Pollock and Richards were past masters at farming the strike. How did you manage to avoid spending your time at the bowler’s end? He grinned. ‘Getting on strike was a bit of an art form.’ How come there wasn’t a run out then? ‘I think we both recognised that the other was playing just as well so we more or less took what was in front of us.’

Having hit 20 fours and one six, Barry had a slog at Freeman and was bowled for 140. ‘Whatever you say about the Aussies,’ Barry said, ‘if you gained their respect, they were generous with their praise. Lawry, for example. He was a dour sod on the field but off it he was fair and complimentary – a very funny man, actually.’ Lawry, together with the rest of his team, stood and applauded Barry all the way back to the pavilion. Barry sighed at the memory. ‘I gave it away. A double century was there for the taking.’

Not for the first time, nor the last, in our protracted conversations, he lamented the number of times that he had given his wicket away in the course of his career. ‘Staggering!’ he sighed. As we shall see, even in this series, he was rarely dismissed by the bowler, more by his own carelessness and desire to entertain. ‘I could never have batted like Boycott,’ he said. Fair enough. It takes all sorts to make a batting line-up. If there were ten Boycotts in your side, you might build up a considerable score but it would be made in front of a sparse crowd. Kingsmead, packed to the rafters, stood as one to acclaim an innings of genius as Barry walked back to the pavilion, doffing his green cap, just as Grandpa Percy had told him all those years ago.

It needs to be put on record that the run feast did not cease once Richards had disappeared into the dressing room. As Chappell had predicted, Pollock did not give his wicket away. He carried on irresistibly, remorselessly, ruthlessly. Barry described Pollock’s batting thus, ‘GP was a wonderful player, one of the best. What I admired was his uncanny ability to miss the fielder. He never missed the gap.’ Lee Irvine, who was watching from the other end, agreed. ‘GP was hungrier. He never gave his wicket away. Never!’ Pollock batted on for another six hours and was eventually out to a tired shot off the part-time leg spin of Keith Stackpole for 274, then a South African record.

During this day’s cricket, it had passed almost unnoticed that the centurion from the first Test, Eddie Barlow, had been dismissed in short order for one. On his return to the home dressing room, he is alleged to have said, ’After the Lord Mayor’s Show, there was no room for me out there. I was embarrassed. Those two have made a mockery of batting.’

And this from one of the finest all-rounders in South African cricket, whose top score in Tests was 201, finishing his career with a Test average of 45.74. To say nothing of his occasional inspired spells of bowling.

To add some colour, I think I shall quote at length the eyewitness accounts of two who were there. Ali Bacher first:

‘Graeme had watched Barry bat supremely. He saw the centre stage was taken by an emerging, strong Barry Richards. Being a great batsman, he would never say it but I could sense him thinking aloud to himself, “That is great batting. I could do the same, if not better.” So in many ways, Barry’s performance motivated Graeme further. But he was very dignified. Great players compete against each other to raise their own performance. That is what happened at Kingsmead in that Test.’

And now let us hear from the great man himself. And for once I am not referring to Barry but to Graeme Pollock:

‘I must agree that I was under pressure. Barry had not played in the 1966/67 series and he was a great player who should have played three or four years earlier. I told myself, “Look, the guy can play and I’ve got to be at my best to keep up with him.” He had set it up and I had to play well when I came in to bat. Fortunately it worked out that way as Barry gave it away for 140 and I went on to finish the double century.’

Was this Pollock’s greatest innings? ‘I don’t think so,’ Barry answered. ‘I think his 125 at Trent Bridge in 1965 was better.’ Was this 140 your best innings? ‘It’s up there. But don’t forget my 325 in one day at Perth.’ Of course. How forgetful of me. ‘Then there was the 120 at Port Elizabeth.’ Yes, that was in the fourth Test but we haven’t reached there yet. He started to think back in an abstracted manner. ‘There was also 200 against Notts…and 70 against Yorkshire…oh, I don’t know Murt. It was all a long time ago.’

You might be surprised to hear that a score of only 70 he rated as being one his best. But like all great batsmen, it is the level of difficulty, as well as the quality of the bowling, that he takes into consideration when assessing an innings. To satisfy my curiosity, I looked up the scorecard of this match. It was in early May in 1968 against Yorkshire at Harrogate. ‘Jeez Murt, it was only my second match for Hampshire. I’d never seen a wicket like it.’ Indeed. Harrogate is a charming spa town in north Yorkshire but the cricket ground is no more than a club ground and an ill-prepared greentop in one of the most northern outposts of first-class cricket in England was a world away, geographically, spiritually and environmentally, from southern Africa. I bet he did not lend out any sweaters on this occasion.

And look at the Yorkshire bowling attack – Trueman, Nicholson, Close, Illingworth, Wilson. They all knew a thing or two about exploiting local conditions. Keith Wheatley, a team-mate of Barry’s at Hampshire, said this about it. ‘Don’t forget in those days we were playing on uncovered wickets. This one had been exposed to overnight rain and was a shocker, turning square and bouncing. Everybody was floundering but Barry would play this immaculate shot and cry, “Come two.”’ Two? Why only two? He usually hit fours. ‘Outfield, mate. The ball would hit a puddle in the outfield and just stop. Illy was tearing his hair out.’ Barry’s score of 70 is put into sharp relief when you discover that only one other Hampshire batsman got into double figures, and that was a paltry 18. In runs scored, no, it was not Barry’s most productive score but my word, he looks back on it with justifiable pride and satisfaction.

Did you celebrate that night? ‘Not really. To be honest, I was too knackered.’ What about press interviews and all that? ‘Lots of people had been impressed. Reporters and radio people were milling about, all getting very excited. But I wasn’t called to do a press conference or anything like that.’ Is there any TV footage in existence of your innings? He looked at me as if asking himself how many times he was going to have to remind me that there was no television in South Africa. ‘No footage at all. Well, there is some on 8mm film, but everyone looks a hundred miles away.’ That is a crying shame. Who would not give his eye teeth to watch footage of that day’s play?

He then went on to describe, in fascinating detail, his battle with Gleeson. Unlike any spinner before or since, with the possible exception of another Australian from an earlier era, Jack Iverson, Gleeson flicked the ball from his middle finger, and depending from which side of the finger it was flicked would determine whether it was an off break or a leg break. This is a fiendishly difficult trick to master; just try doing it with a tennis ball in your front room. You would expect such an unconventional delivery to be difficult to control but in fact Gleeson bowled with rare accuracy and troubled even the best players during his career. Certainly none of the South Africans could pick him and he was the subject of much discussion on how best to play him. Lee Irvine remembers those conversations before the match with great clarity. ‘Gleeson mystified everyone,’ he said. ‘We all had an opinion on how best to play him. Barlow had one, Pollock had another, Bacher had a third. Barry announced to everyone his plan, “I’m not going to let it bounce.” And that is precisely what he did!’

He then told me an amusing story against himself on this very subject. Pollock was 80 not out when Irvine, batting at number five, joined him in the middle. They had a little chat before Irvine took guard, the way you do, more for moral support than anything else. But Pollock had a theory on how to play Gleeson and told his partner he had worked out how to pick him. The unveiling of the mystery was good news so Irvine listened with all ears. If you could see the middle finger at the moment when Gleeson released the ball, reckoned Pollock, then it was the googly. If you couldn’t, it was the leg-spinner. Irvine thanked his partner and resolved to take his advice; after all, Pollock appeared to be little troubled by the spinner and was now smashing the ball to all parts of the ground. How did it go? ‘I watched the hand closely and saw that the finger was up. The googly! I played at it, missed and was bowled. Later, I asked Graeme, “What happened? You told me it would be the googly and it wasn’t.” “Oh, I just play him off the pitch,” was his reply.’ I suppose you can if you’re a genius. They seem to see the ball so much quicker than the rest of us poor mortals.

Eddie Barlow’s theory also failed empirical assessment. As we have seen, he was not at the crease long enough at Kingsmead to put it to the test but he was determined to do so in the next match. John Traicos takes up the story:

‘Eddie disagreed with Barry’s theory and said that he had already picked Gleeson’s off-spinner but would not divulge his theory, saying that he would show us all how to play him in the middle. In the third Test, Eddie was batting at number five and Gleeson came on to bowl. Eddie nipped down the track to the second ball and, picking up the off-spinner, hit him through midwicket for four. As he strode back to the crease, chest protruding in typical “Bunter” style, sleeves rolled up high on his arms, he looked towards the changing room with a confident look as if to say, “I told you so.” Two balls later, he charged down the wicket to hit what he thought was the off-spinner through midwicket, only to be stumped by three yards! Needless to say, he received several comments of “Well read, Eddie” when he returned to the dressing room.’

I wondered the theory Barry had come up with and trusted. ‘Well Murt,’ he said as if the answer was as plain as a pikestaff, ‘If the ball doesn’t bounce, it doesn’t spin. Does it?’ So Lee Irvine’s comment was exactly right: Barry used his feet to combat Gleeson’s mysteries. Successfully too, for Gleeson did not take Barry’s wicket throughout the series, even though he bowled better than any of the Australians and to the end, none of the South Africans truly mastered him. ‘He didn’t spin it much,’ was Barry’s verdict. ‘You’d allow a little bit of room to counter it if it was the leggie. And if it was the offie and you missed it, it would hit you on the pad. And no umpire’s going to give you out if you’re halfway down the wicket.’

I have seen the master batsman put this technique to the test on many an occasion. It is a tactic that tends to ruin the rhythm and the flight of even the best spinners. One of the most absorbing innings I saw him play was when he took on Bishan Bedi in a crucial match between Hampshire and Northamptonshire. The tussle between arguably the best spinner in the world and the best batsman was riveting stuff. Barry did not have it all his own way and always said afterwards that Bedi was the finest spin bowler he ever faced. That innings belongs in a later chapter but I refer to it because it needs to be pointed out that Barry always used his feet against the spinners. He seemed to be able to wait that fraction longer at the crease than most batsmen before making his move, so the bowler had no time to react. ‘If you force him to adjust his length, he can’t give it so much air, therefore reducing the amount of spin he can put on the ball.’ As ever with Barry, it was a case of seizing the initiative, a refusal to be dominated. He rarely was.

Nor, it seemed, were the rest of the South African team in this golden summer, which was turning current international form and conventional wisdom on its head. It was not only in South Africa that this young, talented, exuberant team was catching the eye; Wisden marvelled at the scale of the humiliation heaped on their respected opponents in a series that ‘rocked the cricketing world’. The home side’s only possible enemy was complacency. They had made it all look so ridiculously easy. John Traicos takes up this theme. He said that Ali Bacher’s concern was that this exceptionally talented, youthful team were too confident in their ability:

‘Ali was so paranoid about over-confidence that before the third Test, he terminated the pre-match practice after half an hour because he felt that the batsmen, Barry and Lee Irvine in particular, were messing around in the nets. Ali called everyone together and lectured us on how the series was not yet won even though we were two up and he pointed out that South Africa had lost many series to Australia and that we could not ever be too confident. He then put us through a strenuous fielding session for an hour and a half.’

Shrewd reader of men that he was, Bacher had a point. Barry admits to carelessness being the cause of both his dismissals in this Test at The Wanderers in Johannesburg. ‘I had a hundred in both innings there for the taking,’ he said, ‘but I got a bit carried away.’ The lure of a century before lunch, denied him by Lawry’s bootlaces in the previous Test, was understandably enticing. Graham McKenzie had been dropped – his figures so far in the series had represented a catastrophic loss of form for this tremendous bowler – and Mayne chosen in his stead. ‘He was a bit sharper than the rest,’ Barry said, ‘so I took him on.’ Not for the first time in his career, please note, it was the challenge that stirred his competitive juices. But once again, he gave it away. He was batting with supreme confidence, seemingly playing strokes at will, and it was a surprise when he was out for 65.

Looking back on this innings, and indeed on his batting throughout the series, he expresses wonder at the rapidity of the run rate. In those days, innings were measured by time at the crease rather than by the number of runs scored in relation to the number of balls faced. He was dismissed 40 minutes before lunch so the prospect of tucking into his salad with three figures to his name was not an unrealistic target. He was batting that well. He had faced only 74 balls, hitting 12 fours and a six, an extraordinary run rate for a Test match, for the first morning of a Test too. ‘It wasn’t really Test cricket,’ he said, ‘or at least how Test cricket was meant to be played.’ By contrast, Pollock took 157 balls in scoring 52 but it must be stressed that for once, the great man had struggled to find his touch.

In the second innings, with South Africa holding an unexceptional lead of 77, Barry opened with Eddie Barlow, not Trevor Goddard, who had accompanied him to the middle on each occasion hitherto. He had been demoted to number nine in the order. In fact, this was to be Goddard’s final Test. Did he have an inkling that he was going to be dropped? Those who accused Barry of being money-oriented and self-serving ought to listen to his response, uttered with real sadness and a touch of anger. ‘There was no sentiment, no thought of allowing a great servant of South African cricket a public send-off at a time of his own choosing, like Tendulkar and Kallis. I read, like he did, I guess, that he had been dropped in the paper!’ Indeed, it does seem insensitive at best. The series had been won – South Africa won the match by the convincing margin of 307 runs – there was only one match left, Goddard was a legend in the game, his international career had spanned the years from 1955 to 1970 and he had been one of the great, if largely unacknowledged, all-rounders, a model of classical technique with bat and ball. Surely he deserved an appreciative farewell in front of his home crowd. ‘I was very sad at what happened,’ said Barry. ‘He had been a great mentor to me; I owed him a lot. But that was how it was done in those days. Useless amateurs in charge.’

Talking of amateurism, may I ask how much you were paid per Test? He had to think about that, as if such a paltry sum was hardly worth remembering. ‘I don’t know… three or four hundred rand?’ Peanuts really, when you consider you were providing gripping entertainment to packed grounds. He rather liked that word ‘entertainment’. It lay at the heart of what it was all about, in his opinion. True, he could have scored more runs if he had been more run hungry. But it wasn’t so much the number of runs that he scored but the manner in which he made them that gave him satisfaction in what he did. ‘I was determined not to fit into the stereotype of an opener, cautious, safe, stodgy, whose job was to see off the new-ball bowlers by grinding them down. I wanted to play my normal attacking game.’

Today, aggressive opening bats are commonplace; back then, Barry was an innovator, the first of a new breed.

So where did all the money go? ‘What money?’ The gate money. Sold-out matches. Huge revenue. Where did it all go? ‘To the individual provincial associations. So all those officials in blazers could sit in the front of the plane!’ I laughed. So did he. Cynicism of the game’s overlords in those days was not the sole preserve of one South African opening batsman. He then told me an amusing story of his time at Hampshire and seeing that we are currently on the topic, I raise it now, rather than later. When Barry first arrived at Southampton, he had no car, no means of getting around the country. He waited patiently for a few days but no car came rolling through the gates of the county ground. Nor did there seem any likelihood that one would. Eventually, after consultation with friends and advisors, among whom was numbered Richie Benaud, he went in to see the club secretary, Desmond Eagar. In point of fact, Barry quite liked the Sec, as Desmond was known, and he was not alone in this. The Sec had an old-fashioned courtesy about him that seemed to excuse the rarefied air of the conservative, even antiquated, world in which he had been brought up and lived. Barry explained what happened. ‘I demanded a car. “A car!” spluttered Desmond. Yes, a car. You know, one with four wheels. And not any old, second-hand tin can. I mean a new car. “A new car!” Desmond choked. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.’ And did you get your new car? Silly question. Of course he did. Not from the club but from a committee member who owned a garage. Barry then gave a sigh. ‘I wasn’t the most diplomatic in those days, was I?’

The South African team carried their aura of invincibility to Port Elizabeth for the fourth and final Test. Australia were mentally and physically spent. They had arrived in the country after an exacting tour of India. As amateurs, all of them had taken extended leave from their jobs and had now been away from home for five months. There was simmering tension between the players and the Australian Board about just about everything, a boil that was not to be lanced for a further seven years, when a certain Mr Packer flexed his considerable financial muscle. Their captain, Bill Lawry, was out of form and out of favour with several of his own players, most notably Ian Chappell, who wasted no time on his return home to effect a palace revolution, having Lawry removed and himself put in his place. They were a tired and dispirited team, ripe for the plucking, and Ali Bacher, the Springbok captain, was in the mood to complete a ruthless clean sweep.

A significant step towards his goal was taken when he won the toss for the fourth time in a row and out stepped Barry, with his new partner, Eddie Barlow, to torment the Australian bowlers once more. How heartily sick of the sight of him they must have been. ‘We managed the only century opening partnership of the series,’ Barry told me. I loved the use of that word ‘managed’, as if had been a struggle. In fact it was no struggle; it all seemed so ridiculously easy, aided as they were by dropped catches, an affliction that had plagued the Australians throughout all four matches. It is odd that the catching is often the first of the disciplines to fall apart when a team starts to implode. The South African catching, by contrast, was near faultless. Having been granted a life when the simplest of chances was muffed, Barry carved away merrily to score 81. ‘Should have been a hundred,’ he said ruefully. Connolly, who had got him, bowled well and was rewarded with six wickets for his toils. But it was no more than a futile counter attack from a tired and dispirited team who could already see the writing on the wall.

Armed with a lead of 100, Richards and Barlow were instructed in the second innings to deliver the coup-de-grâce. Barry needed no second bidding. It was at this point of my narrative that words started to fail me. How best to describe an innings of such sublime beauty and majesty when all my adjectives have been used up? Press into service the words of others, said a little voice in my ear, a whisper that became an insistent voice, a familiar one – down the phone, as it happened, belonging to an old friend and colleague of mine. Roger Tolchard, the former England and Leicestershire player, reminded me that he was in the Eastern Cape at that time, coaching in schools, and was at St George’s Park to witness Barry’s onslaught. ‘It was a magnificent display,’ enthused Tolchard and, believe me, Roger is not prone to hyperbole. ‘He was the best orthodox right-hander I have ever seen.’ And as a wicketkeeper who played 18 years of county cricket, he stood behind a few in his time. ‘Barry read the length so well and the way he used his feet was…well, he played so beautifully.’ And this was from one who was renowned for his nimble footwork. ‘Tolchard,’ remarked his cricket master, George Chesterton, ‘He used to be up the wicket like a ferret up a trouser leg.’ Roger said nothing about ferrets in his assessment of Barry’s innings and many subsequent others. ‘It was just an honour to play against him,’ he said simply.

I guess honour was not at the forefront of the Australians’ minds that day, though I am sure that they would have been honest enough to admit later that they had been in the presence of batting genius. Graham McKenzie, recalled for this match, was generous enough to say this of Barry, ‘He was in my opinion the most gifted batsman I bowled to in my career.’ In simple terms, Barry scored 126, with 16 fours and three sixes, which meant that 94 of his runs came in boundaries – Barry dealt predominantly in boundaries; the quick single and regular rotation of the strike were not to be found in his kit bag – and every one of which hit the boards must have sounded to the Australians like another nail being hammered into the coffin of a disastrous tour. My faithful Wisden, as you would expect, described it in less luminescent terms, ‘Richards again played the dominant part and, after Barlow’s dismissal, he ran amok and punished all the bowlers. He reached his second hundred out of 159 in three and a quarter hours and with his score at 118 brought his total for the series to 500. A quarter of an hour later, after four hours at the crease, he played a tired stroke to Mayne and was out for 126.’

How did you feel? ‘I was walking on air,’ Barry answered, ‘with all the exuberance of youth.’ Barry sauntered off to a standing ovation, doffing his cap – of course – before disappearing into the bowels of the main stand at St George’s Park. And he never emerged again. His Test career was over, a brief, blinding streak across the cricketing firmament…and it was gone.

That team may not have known that it was all over – though one or two of them probably sensed that political trouble was afoot – but they certainly knew that the match was over and with it a thumping clean sweep of the series. You’d won by 323 runs, you’d blown away the number one team in the world, you had been in magnificent form yourself…How did you celebrate? ‘We didn’t have an open top bus parade to Trafalgar Square, if that’s what you mean,’ he commented archly. Certainly not. I did think that was a bit over the top. But Port Elizabeth’s finest hostelries must have thrown open their doors for you. After all, PE is known as the Friendly City. He shook his head. ‘No, not really. A few beers in the dressing room after the game. No official function or anything like that was laid on for us. We were soon on the plane and on our way home.’ Somehow, it doesn’t seem fitting, such a low key ending to a legendary series. That team of all the talents deserved more. But, as Barry said, the game was run by amateurs – what else can you expect?

Not only for Barry was this the end. The rest of his team-mates had just played their last Test match. Actually, this is not quite correct. In an interesting but little-known footnote of cricket history, John Traicos did play Test cricket again, 22 years and 222 days later, thus becoming the player with the longest interval between Test appearances. In 1992, when Zimbabwe – Traicos’s birthplace – was granted Test match status, the country’s inaugural match was against India in Harare and Traicos was selected. He could never have imagined that, needless to say, as he contemplated over a beer or two with others of the team in the St George’s Park dressing room South Africa’s uncertain future on the world’s sporting stage, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. ‘So that meant that two of us became the only South Africans – with the exception of some obscure guy in the 1930s – to have scored a hundred in our last Test,’ said Barry. He was referring to his team-mate, Lee Irvine, who had scored 102 in South Africa’s second innings, to follow Barry’s 126, out of a total of 470/8 declared, leaving Australia a mammoth 569 to win. They had fallen agonisingly short, by 323 runs.

Irvine was proud of his innings, as well he might. ‘The wicket at St George’s was taking spin. Gleeson and Mallett were getting it to turn and Connolly was bowling his cutters.’ We both agreed that the level of difficulty had put Barry’s masterful innings into context. ‘So that made me the last Springbok to score a hundred in his final Test.’ No longer, Lee, no longer. Jacques Kallis has just quit the international scene with a hundred in his last Test. ‘No, no, man,’ Irvine sought to put me right, ‘I am the last Springbok to do so. Kallis was a Protea, as they call themselves these days.’ Politically, he is right of course and Lee was ever one to choose his words carefully.

So who was this ‘obscure guy in the 1930s’ to whom Barry was referring? I hate loose ends so I looked it up. It was none other than Pieter van der Bijl, the father of Barry’s great friend and later colleague in the Natal side, Vintcent. The date was 1938, the match was the famous Timeless Test and van der Bijl scored 125 and 97, thus narrowly missing the distinction of being the first South African to score two tons in the same Test against England. The world war soon broke out, which put an end to the Test career of van der Bijl and that of many others. I spoke to Vintcent about this delightful coincidence. ‘My dad would be flattered and amazed that he could be included with these great names,’ said his son. ‘He was a slow and resolute batsman. Barry would have had a heart attack at his run rate!’ Never mind Barry’s rocketing blood pressure at the defensive mindset of opening batsmen in those days, he nearly did have a heart attack when I revealed to him the identity of this ‘obscure guy’.

Vince then went on to tell me an interesting little anecdote about that Timeless Test. ‘Dad played before the days of arm guards, helmets and body armour and came back from his innings peppered black and blue by Farnes.’ Ken Farnes, who was to die not long afterwards, killed on a night-flying exercise in the RAF plane he was piloting, was an exceedingly tall and fit fast bowler for England, who could generate surprising pace and lift from a short run. ‘Dad was at Oxford at the same time Farnes was at Cambridge,’ Vince continued, ‘and they knew each other well. It was an era of tough gentlemen. “That’s enough, Ken,” said Dad after taking another body blow – that was all.’

And was it? ‘No. Farnes continued to pepper him.’ In another twist to the story, van der Bijl Snr later became a Test selector and though he was no longer on the panel when the team to play Australia in 1967 was announced, he went on record to say that in his opinion the young Barry Richards should be in the team. ‘And he was not,’ added Vince, ‘much to Dad’s annoyance.’ And greatly to Barry’s as well, let us remember, to say nothing of his sore foot. Van der Bijl’s estimation of Barry’s superlative talent had been vindicated in this series and he was pleased. According to his son, ‘Dad saw Barry as the truly great classic exponent of batsmanship, the ideal model to emulate.’

But Richards was not the only great player in this team. The debate rages to this day where alongside the great teams since the Second World War the 1970 South Africans would have stood. In most people’s minds, three teams vie for the accolade of the best ever – the 1948 Australians, the West Indies of the 1980s and the Australian side of the 2000s. Let us look at them in a little more detail. The Australian team that toured England in 1948 went through the summer unbeaten and were thus dubbed The Invincibles. Led by Bradman, they had, among others, Hassett, Harvey, Morris, Brown, Lindwall, Miller, Tallon, Johnson and Johnstone. The West Indian team which pulverised most opponents in the 80s was led by Lloyd and had in the side Richards, Greenidge, Haynes and an endless production line of fast bowlers: Roberts, Holding, Garner, Croft, Patterson, Clarke and Marshall (but no spinner, note, though they hardly needed one). The Australians who carried all before them in the 2000s were captained by Steve Waugh and called upon Mark Waugh, Hayden, Langer, Ponting, Gilchrist, Warne, Gillespie, McGrath and Lee (and they did have a spinner!).

Now, how would the South African team of 1970 have compared? Shrewdly led by the good doctor, Ali Bacher, the team comprised Richards, Barlow, Graeme Pollock, Irvine, Lindsay, Lance, Procter, Peter Pollock, Trimborn and Traicos (Procter at number eight!). It seems to me that all bases have been covered, allied to which electric fielding and entertainment value would have cemented their popularity in the public’s eyes. It is a melancholy thought that this team were to disband, depart and never convene again on or off the field of play. How it would have competed over a period of time is anybody’s guess but it is diverting to imagine. It goes without saying that the greater good brought about – partly – by South Africa’s banishment was effective and worthwhile but it is difficult not to weep at so much forfeited talent. It is Irvine’s opinion that they would have dominated the international scene for the next decade.

‘Look at the ages of that team,’ he said. ‘We were all in our 20s with our best years ahead of us. It was heartbreaking, to be truthful.’ Then Barry interjected with this conviction. ‘A year or two later, it would have been an even better side, with van der Bijl, Rice, Hobson, le Roux.’ Perhaps so but how much better it might have been if apartheid had not existed and players of colour could have joined them. There were plenty more D’Oliveiras where he came from. And that came from Basil himself. ‘Politics, politics,’ Barry said. ‘Politics have dominated my life.’

They have indeed. In 1970, politics, specifically the politics of apartheid, were dominating just about every newspaper, TV current affairs programme, public forum, debating chamber, legislative assembly, even the dinner table, pretty well throughout the world. As the victorious South African team celebrated with their beers in the St George’s Park pavilion, they needed only to have stuck their heads out of the door to appreciate the problem. The teeming throng that hailed them as they left the field was exclusively white. There were coloured spectators but they were segregated in another, shabbier part of the stadium. Actually, the series had been of great interest to the non-white population and they had flocked in their thousands to watch – particularly in Durban and Cape Town – but it had become apparent that most of them were cheering for the Australians.

This is not to accuse any of the South African team of political naivety or moral blindness; far from it. Some of them had long been harbouring genuine misgivings and real fears about the future, not just of cricket in the country but also of the very fabric of South African society. Lee Irvine, for one, strenuously rejects any claims that they were complacent or immobile in the face of the gathering storm, rather like those farmers who heedlessly continued to till their land on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius as the volcano erupted. ‘What irritated us most,’ he said, ‘was that we, coming largely from English backgrounds, were far more liberal than the rugby players, who were mainly Afrikaans and supported apartheid.’

Ah yes, the Springbok rugby team. While their countrymen were annihilating the Australians on the cricket field, the national rugby team were undergoing – there is no other word for it – a tour of the British Isles and Ireland. It was beset by violent demonstrations and acts of sabotage and their progress around the country took on a nasty and dangerous edge. I well remember Peter Hain, the chairman of the Stop The Seventy Tour campaign, hectoring the British public through a loudhailer in front of vociferous and increasingly unruly crowds. The rugby tour had gone ahead, in spite of massed protests, but now Hain and his supporters had the impending tour that summer by the South African cricket team firmly in their sights. At the time, I was appalled by the ferocity of the protestors’ anger and the extreme lengths they were prepared to go to to force the issue. I abhorred the principle of apartheid as much as the next man but to scupper games of cricket…well, that was going too far. Time and subsequent events were to bring me to my senses.

My lack of worldliness was not at all excusable – after all, there was plenty of hot air being expended around my university campus at that time – but what of our friends basking in the glow of their 4-0 whitewash of Australia? Had they got their heads firmly buried in the sand too? First, I think it’s important to understand the mental attitude of the professional sportsman. To be successful, you have to possess extraordinary powers of concentration, able to block out of your mind any extraneous distraction, focussing sharply on the task in hand, so much so that you appear to be in a bubble of absorption. All that counts in your life at that moment is the 4.25-inch diameter of the hole as you line up your putt, the 24-foot width of the goal in front of you as you step up to put that penalty away, the ten-foot height of the crossbar that you must clear for a conversion, the 100m of rubberised track stretching out in front of you as you crouch in readiness for the gun.

A friend of mine who was an international squash player said to me that when he was on court and the door was closed, he felt as if the rest of the world had been shut out. Cricketers are no different; their business concerns exclusively the cut and rolled 22-yard stretch of turf. The travails assailing the national rugby team in Britain could not have escaped their notice but they couldn’t afford to worry about that; they had a series to win. So Barry’s decision to sidestep the issue for the time being, hoping against hope that things would sort themselves out, is more understandable, given the context of his personal situation. After all, he had just been catapulted into the stratosphere of cricketing fame and it would take a bit of getting used to.

Barry had already returned to England for the start of the cricket season with Hampshire when the touring party to England was announced and for the record it comprised: Bacher (captain), Barlow, G. Pollock, Irvine, Lindsay, Lance, Procter, P. Pollock, Richards, Trimborn, Traicos, Short, Watson and Chevalier. A team to whet any cricket lover’s appetite and there were plenty in England, in spite of the demonstrations, who were eagerly looking forward to their arrival. And it seemed, for a while anyway, that they would come. But Barry smelt trouble. ‘I started to realise it would never happen,’ he said, ‘Peter Hain was gathering his troops and I could sense the public mood was against it, something I had been unaware of back home.’

Yet the cricket authorities in both countries were adamant that the protestors would not win the day and that the tour would go ahead, come what may. They must have been blind. And deaf. The rugby tour was staggering on, the matches played behind police cordons and in an atmosphere that was becoming increasingly ugly. The Springbok coach was even hijacked on its way to Twickenham for the international against England. Lord’s was forced to protect the playing area behind barbed wire. Weed killer had been poured on to the outfield at Worcester, traditionally the venue for the first match of the tour. In total, 12 county grounds were vandalised by protestors. Even I could see that you could never fully protect a cricket match from disruption. If one dozy spectator can bring the game to a halt by carelessly walking in front of the sightscreen, just think what an army of violent protestors could do. It was not as if there was no precedent.

Only recently, MCC had had a salutary experience. Following the cancellation of the tour to South Africa in the wake of the D’Oliveira Affair, they had sent the England side to Pakistan. Not the most insightful of judgements. The country was in the throes of a civil war and the team had to flee for their lives in the middle of a Test match in Karachi. It is said that when their plane cleared Pakistani air space, a great cheer went up in the cabin. No, the tour was never a feasible proposition; when passions are aroused and tempers flare, cricket is very vulnerable. Lee Irvine, who was also in the country plying his trade with Essex, clearly saw the futility of the whole thing. ‘No way could that tour ever have taken place,’ he stated emphatically.

As if manna from heaven, a fortuitous, if shocking, piece of propaganda had fallen into the laps of the campaign to stop the tour. In February 1971, Arthur Ashe, the US Open champion, was refused entry into South Africa because of his colour. Whatever the morals of the conflict between the two sides, the PR battle was being won by the protestors. When the politicians got involved, the game was all but over. A general election in Britain was but a month away and Harold Wilson, the prime minister, was fearful of racial unrest and the unpopularity to the government that continued unrest would cause. The tour was shortened, the first month abandoned. Finally a strong and official letter of warning from the home secretary, James Callaghan, forced the issue. In late May 1970, the tour was officially called off. MCC regretted the decision, stating that it was their firm belief that sport and politics should not mix. But they might as well have been howling at the moon. In the end, it was the politicians who made the call.

‘For me personally,’ Irvine told me, ‘it was heartbreaking. We’d even sewed the name tags on all our official kit. Having played on what were no more than club pitches for Essex, I was looking forward to batting on decent Test wickets.’ He also had his eye on the batsman/wicketkeeping role. ‘That was my ambition anyway. It would have allowed us to play another bowler.’ Perhaps he would have been a forerunner of the modern Adam Gilchrist. Perhaps, perhaps. This story is full of perhaps. And what of Barry’s reaction? More a resigned submission to the inevitable than anything else. ‘Almost unbelievably, I still believed that it was not the end. There was still the 1971/72 tour to Australia to look forward to and prepare for.’ His preparation could not have been more meticulously planned and executed. But then politics stuck its nose in again and after that, it really was all over.

In the meantime, the Test and County Cricket Board, having turned down the South African tourists, found themselves with a large hole to fill at very short notice. A collection of overseas stars was hastily assembled to play five Test matches against England during the summer, a team which was to be called the Rest of the World. No lack of aspiration there. In all fairness, the ad hoc team had a decent sprinkling of stardust over it. The irony of ironies was that five of the original South African party – the two Pollocks, Barlow, Procter and Richards – were invited to play, and no one turned a hair. In a sense, that was perfectly understandable as they were not representing their country but were playing as individuals in an invitation XI. The rest, if you will pardon the pun, were employed by English counties and were already in the country. They were: McKenzie (Australia), Engineer (India), Intikhab, Mushtaq (Pakistan), Gibbs, Kanhai, Lloyd, Murray, Sobers (West Indies). Without doubt, this was a team fit to set before the British public.

But the series never really took off. For the true aficionados of the game, it proved to be a sumptuous banquet of varied and mouthwatering dishes but it lacked the true edge of international competition. Not that any of the players on either side took the games lightly; they had their reputations to protect and we all know how jealously sportsmen guard their reputations. It was no different for Graeme Pollock, for example. He knew that the eyes of the cricketing world were upon him, comparing him to that other great left-hander at the other end, Garry Sobers. He could not afford to let his guard down any more than Sobers could. And they didn’t.

For all that, they weren’t the South Africans, whom everybody had heard about and everybody wanted to see, leaving aside political and moral misgivings. From a purely cricketing point of view, it had been a beguiling prospect and the decision to cancel had been met with huge disappointment, if philosophical acceptance of the reasons. The explanation that the British public were slow to warm to the replacement series, interesting and competitive though it was, can probably be put down to the fact that the Rest of the World were not South Africa, even if South Africans were playing. Some years later, I talked to Mushtaq Mohammed about it all. It had been a marvellous experience, he said, and the cricket had been hugely enjoyable. ‘But after it was all finished, I was left with a funny feeling because we weren’t playing under a flag, as it was when I was winning with Pakistan.’ Barry agreed. ‘We weren’t really a team but a collection of highly talented individuals.’

How did you all get on? ‘Fine, absolutely fine. Most of us knew each other because we had all been playing county cricket. No one was a stranger.’ How did the black players get on with the white South Africans? He shook his head. There had been no reason for my asking the question really. Cricketers of all nationalities and races have traditionally got on well. Social or professional acceptance has never been a problem in the dressing room. Respect has always been gained by performance on the field, not by colour or class. ‘Look Murt,’ Barry said, ‘when I came to Hampshire, we had three West Indians in the team, Roy Marshall, Danny Livingstone and John Holder, and a bit later, of course, my opening partner, Gordon Greenidge. You know we all got on okay and happily integrated as a team.’ That was no less than the truth. Let me leave the last word on the subject to Clive Lloyd; ‘The whole situation seemed so silly. We weren’t allowed to take on South Africa but here I was playing alongside half of their team in a Test match.’

There was another reason for the initial sluggish start before the series started to warm up, Barry contended. ‘Because it was so hastily arranged, there wasn’t much marketing or publicity that had gone on. The crowds weren’t great, at least not to start with.’ Were you paid handsomely? ‘No, not much. We were playing for our reputation, not for the money.’ Did you train, practise, have nets? He laughed. ‘We didn’t take it that seriously. We just went from one ground to another, rocked up, had a chat and next day we went out and played.’ Was there a sense of esprit de corps, team spirit, bonding and all that? ‘Oh, we all had a great time. Ho-hum, let’s have fun!’ He drew a telling contrast with World Series Cricket during the Packer Revolution eight years later. ‘Now those game were taken seriously. The pressure was immense. If you didn’t perform you were out, man, no messing about. Packer wanted red-blooded competition and entertainment and what Packer wanted, Packer usually got.’

Perhaps the lack of true edge to the games, which can only be guaranteed by representing your country, goes some way to explaining Barry’s mediocre form during the series, in this year of all years. ‘I played all right,’ he said unconvinced, ‘but I never hit the heights.’ Surprisingly true. He played in all five Tests, scoring 257 runs at an average of 36.71. His highest score was 64. Graeme Pollock had a relatively lean time too. He scored 250 runs at an average of 31.25 but he did hit the heights at last with his masterful 114 at the Oval in the final match sharing in an unforgettable partnership of 165 with Sobers, the world’s two best left-handers slugging it out, side by side. Who can say how adversely Richards and Pollock were affected by the disappointment of the tour’s cancellation. Perhaps they did find it difficult to summon up that fierce patriotic fervour that only manifested itself when playing for their country. Eddie Barlow seemed to have no such qualms. He had an excellent series, scoring 353 runs at 39.22 and taking 20 wickets at 19.80. But there, as everybody to whom I have spoken about this ebullient man said, ‘Bunter’ would fight and scrap to beat his own grandmother at cards. The Ballon d’Or, if such an award existed in cricket, went to the undisputed greatest cricketer in history, Garry Sobers. He scored 588 runs at 73.50 and took 21 wickets at 21.52. Oh, and he captained the side too. In his own inimitable way, as ever. Mushtaq again, ‘How do you tell the best players in the world how to play? So it always ended up being a party. Garry would say, “Do your best and enjoy it.” And then he would say, “Let’s have a drink!”’

The first Test at Lord’s only served to reinforce the popularly held view that the series would be a mismatch. By lunch on the first day, England had been reduced to 44/7 and never really recovered. Sobers, bowling seam-up, was at his masterful best, taking 6-21 to bowl England out for 127. ‘He was a wonderful swinger of the ball,’ said Barry. ‘He would run in and bowl quickly.’ There is an interesting comment about Sobers from Mike Taylor at Hampshire. Before Nottinghamshire ill-advisedly let him go to play for Hampshire, Taylor had played a lot with Sobers in the Notts side. ‘As a new-ball bowler,’ Taylor said, ‘Garry was without equal, swinging it both ways, at pace too. But his slow stuff was pretty ordinary, to be truthful.’ Judged by the lofty standards of his faster variety, that could possibly be accepted as a fair comment but Sobers could, and did, still get useful wickets when he switched to his slower varieties. The Rest of the World piled on the runs. Wisden noted, ‘Sixty-nine for the first wicket, with Richards, all ease and elegance, seemingly untroubled until he was out for 35.’ The total of 546, owing much to a scorching innings of 183 from Sobers, was far too much for England and though they fared better in the second innings, they still lost by an innings and 80 runs. The match attendance was only 35,000 and the sponsors must have had a few sleepless nights as the prospect of a humiliating, not to say financially ruinous, whitewash loomed.

‘Perhaps we did take it a little too easy,’ admitted Barry, ‘for we certainly caught a cold in the second match.’ To everybody’s relief and considerable surprise, England won the match, comfortably in the end, by eight wickets. It was Tony Greig’s debut for England and as ever with this handsome, blond, controversial giant of a showman, it was no muted launch to his international career. He did not feature with the bat but he did take seven wickets, one of which was Barry’s. In cold and damp conditions which greatly favoured the seam bowlers, Barry had batted resourcefully for two and a half hours – no thought here of a hundred before lunch – battling against extravagant seam and swing, before falling to Greig, caught behind for 64. ‘Aaagh – Greigy. Another one of his strangles, caught down the leg side by Knotty.’

Greig had what was known on the circuit as a ‘golden arm’. Ian Botham, too, cast the same sort of spell over batsmen, especially in the latter stages of his career, when he seemed to take wickets with rubbish balls, almost by the sheer force of his personality. Greig exerted the same jinx on Barry in the second innings as well, bowling him for 30. Hereafter, Greig’s story is well known – captain of England, leading light in the Packer Revolution, criticised for his naked commercialism, ostracised by the English hierarchy, respected in later life as a TV commentator in Australia – and he will of course reappear in an important role a little later in this narrative. Even today, following his premature death in 2012, he divides opinion. Whatever you may have thought of him as a player and as a man, it cannot be denied that he was one of the game’s fiercest competitors. It is no coincidence that his Test average with the bat (40.43) far exceeds his first-class average (31.19). Like Barry, he relished a challenge and thrived on the grand stage. ‘Look, Greigy was Greigy,’ Barry commented. ‘A larger than life character. Aggressive and combative.’

Had he come to your notice back in South Africa? ‘He’d played a few games for Eastern Province but he’d made up his mind that he had no future as a Test player in his homeland so he had gone quite early in his career.’ There is no doubt that Tony Greig yearned for the limelight and in England he found it. He also found the daily grind of county cricket tedious. Hove on a chilly morning in early May was just as unappealing a prospect for him as was Portsmouth for Barry, playing in front of a handful of spectators, shrouded in overcoats to combat the biting wind blowing in from the Solent.

In spite of England’s sterling fightback, the Nottingham crowd remained lukewarm about the match; there were more than a handful of spectators but a gate of only 16,000 is slim pickings for a Test match. The cricket fans of Birmingham came out in reasonable numbers, thankfully, for the third Test at Edgbaston. They were rewarded by a typically robust century from D’Oliveira, who alone withstood the fast bowling of Procter, who took five wickets. ‘Prockie wasn’t really fit, you know during this series,’ Barry interjected. No, I didn’t know. It didn’t seem to affect him. He bowled and batted with great skill and purpose throughout, did he not? ‘Just shows what a tremendous athlete he was. He always had a niggle somewhere but he still ran in and bowled quick.’

Barry, out for 47, felt that he had missed out ‘big time’ as the Rest amassed a huge score, with Sobers and Lloyd outdoing each other with the savagery of their strokeplay. Wisden described it as ‘a blistering attack on the bowling’. England batted better in their second dig but the Rest’s target of 141 seemed a formality. In fact it wasn’t. Barlow, Richards, Kanhai, Sobers and Lloyd all fell cheaply and with Pollock injured and unlikely to bat, the alarm bells were set off before Procter knocked off the runs and victory was achieved by five wickets.

England were making a better fist of this than many people thought. What was your opinion of the team? ‘England? It was a well-balanced side. Useful spinners, Illingworth and Underwood. Good pace attack too – Snowy, always a handful. And actually, I thought Alan Ward at Lord’s bowled quicker than anyone. But he was a bit delicate physically and always seemed to get injured.’ Talking of getting injured…you didn’t bat in the fourth Test. How come? ‘I injured my back trying to catch Basil. Actually, I did bat in the second innings but only because I had to.’ Indeed. A closely-fought encounter had led up to this thrilling finale. Snow in an inspired, hostile spell, presaging his Ashes-winning feats in Australia the following winter, had the Rest reeling at 75/5, still 148 short of their target, with Barry, now joined by Kanhai, injured in the pavilion. Injured or not, Barry had to strap on his pads – or perhaps he got someone to do that for him – to make his way gingerly to the middle at number ten to join his mate Procter. Forty-three to win, Barry injured, only the hapless Gibbs to come, Snow’s nostrils flaring and the new ball due – territory unfamiliar to both batsmen. I leave it to Wisden to describe how it ended, ‘The new ball was taken but the England bowlers could do no more and with ice cool batting the two young Springboks settled the match and the series.’

And a hefty win bonus? ‘You’re joking. Our remuneration was…moderate. And what’s more, we were docked our pay from our counties for the matches we missed.’ And once again, he made telling comparisons with the highly organised, fiercely competitive and financially rewarding World Series Cricket. ‘That was much, much tougher. No slacking. Look, in my side were Ian Chappell, Tony Greig and Clive Lloyd, international captains all and fiercely competitive down to their bootlaces.’ But this series wasn’t just a jolly, was it? ‘Some of the guys took it more seriously than the others. I guess the older ones were a bit more focussed.’ Barry was only 23 and certainly not one of the older ones.

You suffered from a bad back from time to time, didn’t you? It was never a serious problem, he said, but as with many bowlers, it occasionally stiffened up. I presumed he was joking about his status as a bowler – when he did bowl, he had the shortest run-up in the world, even for a spinner – but it is true that few professional sportsmen escape discomfort from the stresses and strains on the lower back. ‘It’s often a question of how to manage the pain,’ he maintained. ‘Nowadays, with better medical knowledge, experienced physiotherapists and all the latest equipment…well, it’s light years away from what we were used to.’ And then we both started to laugh, calling to mind the prehistoric first aid facilities available at Hampshire. The physio’s room was no more than a converted cupboard beneath the dressing room steps. The physio, however, was no physiotherapist at all. He was what Mike Taylor humorously referred to as ‘a rub man on the QE2’.

Dear old Jim Ratchford. He had apparently worked as a masseur on cruise liners and massaged more than a few aches and pains of ladies of a certain age. He was a nice man and would do anything for you but he was unqualified, his diagnoses questionable and his treatment limited to a vigorous rub in the vague vicinity of the injury. He had a bag full of unidentified pills stored in suspiciously anonymous phials and his only piece of equipment was a lamp that bathed the room, sorry, shed, in an iridescent red glow, not unlike a darkroom in a photographer’s studio. I doubt he did much harm; indeed, it could be argued that he lent a sympathetic ear – and all professional cricketers need mollycoddling from time to time – and a bolthole for tired players in need of ‘urgent’ attention.

To return to the series…the Yorkshire faithful had turned out in their droves for the fourth Test at Headingley, which brought a smile back to the faces of the sponsors, though the more cynical of observers might have pointed to the fact that attendances were boosted by the return to the England side of one who had the nearest standing to deity of anybody in this white rose county, namely Geoffrey Boycott. By the time of the final match at The Oval it could be safely said that the contest had fired the public’s interest at last and the crowds, 53,000 in total, were treated to an exhibition of batting that was as sublime as it was poignant. The two mighty left-handers, Sobers and Pollock, one a West Indian and the other a South African, doomed never to take the field as opponents in a Test match, shared a partnership of 135 in the last two hours of the second day. It was, as Wisden records, ‘A batting spectacle which will live long in the minds of those privileged to see it.’

Mushtaq, watching from the players’ balcony, remembered hearing someone shout, ‘Lads, come and watch – you’ll not see this again.’ Pollock, who had uncharacteristically struggled for form throughout the series, now regained his touch as the ball scorched the grass in his innings of 114. ‘He’d been experimenting with glasses,’ Barry reminded me. ‘It’s okay if you’ve been wearing glasses all your life – you’re used to them. But trying to adjust to them halfway through your career is a different matter altogether.’

It was fitting that Sobers should hit the winning runs to bring the crowd on to the field, thus wrapping up the series 4-1. It had been a closer-fought contest than many predicted and certainly closer than the winning margin suggested. Illingworth, soon to lead his team to Ashes triumph in Australia, said this about his opponents, ‘They were good. There’d never been a side like it.’ Praise indeed from a Yorkshireman. Clive Lloyd, not a Yorkshireman, agreed, ‘We had an excellent side – the near-perfect team. Spin and pace, great batsmen and two fine wicketkeepers.’ One and all were unanimous in their judgement of the dominant personality of the summer, Garfield Sobers. The abiding memory of the series would ever be the sight of Pollock and Sobers gracing the late summer evening at the Oval, batting together in the cause of international cricket. Black and white – the game of cricket was colour blind and hope burned, if not brightly then at least fitfully, that nothing could possibly wreck that ideal.

As we shall see, politics had not yet done with cricket, not by a long chalk. Another of many body blows was delivered by the International Cricket Conference (later Council) three years later, a glaring instance of a foul punch being dealt long after the bell had sounded. Having originally agreed that the series would be afforded Test match status, the ICC later rescinded this in order to lay down a principle that Test matches can only be played between countries. To the ordinary cricket supporter, the decision seemed crass. To the participants, it was no less than an insult. To poor Alan Jones, who was selected to play in one match, it was a tragedy. He remains the only first-class cricketer to be awarded his country’s cap only to have it taken away from him. Barry’s comment on it all cannot be put down in words; it consisted of no more than a snort of contempt. Mike Denness, a member of the England side, said this, ‘Why? It wasn’t as if it was a mickey-mouse set-up.’ Derek Underwood went further, ‘When they took away Test status, that was a blow…And another thing – if the games had been official, I would have taken 300 Test wickets!’ Which just goes to show that if a first-class cricketer ever claims he is not interested in figures, he is a liar.

Back to Hampshire then, Barry? He nodded. Tell me how it came about that you spent the winter in Australia, not South Africa. ‘Murray Sergeant, convenor of the South Australian selectors, was on the lookout for an overseas player. They’d had Sobers, obviously a popular choice, and the previous year – I don’t know why – Younis Ahmed, who hadn’t been so much of a success. So he made me a generous offer that I couldn’t refuse.’ What was that, if I may ask? ‘One hundred dollars a week, plus $1 a run. Not a fortune but more than I was getting anywhere else.’ But what about Natal? He shrugged. ‘I heard nothing. Had they made a counter offer, or any sort of offer for that matter, I would have gone back.’ But the concept of professionalism simply hadn’t yet taken hold in South Africa. He would have been expected to return and play for Natal for nothing – indeed, it would have been considered a duty for him to do so, one that he ought to have been honoured to fulfil – and hoped that someone would take pity on him and offer him suitable, temporary employment. Thus, add up the possible and set it against the definite and what you have is, as they say, a ‘no brainer’. He was now a professional cricketer and a professional in any walk of life expects to be paid for his services. He went where the money was.

And it was here, I guess, that the whispered charges of ‘mercenary’ started to take hold – Barry Richards follows the money. I should like to turn that around and put it another way. The money follows Barry Richards. And is that not as it should be? Representing your country should be about more than money, I think everybody would agree on that, even though today’s Test players are paid a fortune. But it should still be an honour to wear your country’s cap. However the day job, as it were, should be the free choice of the individual. It is every person’s right to seek employment where he wishes and to expect a fair and reasonable wage for a day’s work. As South Africa had no Test series that winter and as the South Australia offer was so attractive, he took the plane bound for Adelaide, not Durban.

There was another reason for accepting. South Africa were scheduled to tour Australia the following winter, 1971/72, and Barry wanted to familiarise himself with the playing conditions in that country. He has always liked to be prepared and any professional worth his salt should make the necessary provisions to be ready and equipped for the challenges ahead. The concept of mental and physical preparation for a sporting encounter is de rigueur today, not disparaged. I bet the South African Cricket Board would have lauded Barry to the heavens for his foresight if he had broken all records during the tour, had it ever taken place.

South Australia pushed the boat out then, when you landed, said I, mixing my metaphors. ‘Actually I was sponsored by Coca-Cola.’ Did you have to ask for a car? He grinned. ‘No one hit the roof, like Desmond Eagar at Hampshire. It was a big brown one, as I remember – the make escapes me.’ What were your duties? ‘I had to do a bit of coaching in schools during the week and turn out for Prospect Cricket Club at the weekend. And of course represent South Australia in Sheffield Shield matches.’

The Chappell brothers were Adelaidians and both Ian and Greg were in the state side, Ian having just been appointed captain. During their season together, Barry got to know, and became friends with them. It was Greg who met him at the airport and took him to pick up his car. ‘It was now quite late in the day and getting dark,’ remembered Greg, ‘and Barry didn’t know the way. Follow me, I said.’ Barry has memories too of what happened next. ‘Greg was tanking it and I was struggling to keep up as it was dark and the roads were unfamiliar.’ Greg did admit that he took a backstreet route to Barry’s apartment. ‘When we re-joined the main road, there was a set of lights. I made it on green. Barry didn’t.’ In order to hold on to Greg’s fast disappearing coat tails, Barry put his foot down and almost inevitably he was caught on camera by a police car lying in wait. Barry desperately pleaded, if not his innocence, then his case. ‘Look, I’m Barry Richards,’ he said, ‘and up there is Greg Chappell.’ Chappell was indeed ‘up there’, he had pulled in further up the road and ‘he was laughing’ said Barry, ‘but he did nothing.’

As to the outcome, here memories diverge and historical accuracy is impossible to determine. ‘They didn’t bat an eyelid,’ said Barry, ‘and did me anyway, even though I said I was a friend of Greg Chappell.’ ‘They let him off!’ claimed Greg, perhaps unwilling to admit that his fame, and therefore his influence over the local constabulary, had yet to ignite the country.

Chappell’s ability as a batsman, honed by a two-year apprenticeship at Somerset, was clear to everyone at this point, including the Australian selectors, but inconsistency had hitherto held him back. He maintains that spending a season with Barry in the South Australian side was instructive and hugely influential in his development. Barry was (still is!) a couple of years older and when they played against each other in England, Hampshire v Somerset, Greg was naturally drawn as a player to the South African. ‘He was obviously massively talented,’ he said. ‘Tall, upright, assured, mature. When we played Hampshire, I studied him closely. It was a revelation.’ As a naturally leg-sided player, he marvelled at the way Barry hit through and over the off side. ‘Not many do that, you know. He seemed so confident, as if it all came naturally and easy to him. Quite unlike me.’

I gulped. This was Greg Chappell talking to me here, in anybody’s book one of the most elegant and illustrious batsmen of his era, and he was telling me he lacked confidence. One or two bowlers of the 1970s and 80s might be a bit startled to hear that. ‘I was fortunate to be able to study him at close quarters, often from the nonstriker’s end,’ Greg continued, ‘the way he played each ball.’ One particular technical detail he noted was Barry’s grip. Remember the hours and hours in the nets, with Alan Butler exhorting the young Barry to get his left shoulder round and his elbow up? This classically accepted off-side shot can only be played with the left hand around the front of the handle. At first it had felt uncomfortable but gradually it became embedded in Barry’s technique and Greg believed that, to become a better off-side player, he had better copy it. ‘It’s an odd way to hold a bat,’ he confessed. ‘Most people have their wrist a little further round the back of the handle because it feels more comfortable, more natural. But I persevered.’ And who is going to deny that the perseverance paid off?

For Prospect CC, Barry broke all club records. But not before being put firmly in his place ‘in true Aussie style’ by his team-mates. There were two Test spinners in the side, Terry Jenner and Ashley Mallett, apart from Barry, and there was a fourth international there as well, Eric Freeman – no wonder Prospect carried all before them. Although Barry bowled occasional off spin, and not badly either, he was never going to get a smell of the ball, as Australia’s finest informed him. ‘I bowl one end,’ Jenner told him, ‘and Rowdy the other.’ I don’t think Barry was too bothered about the banning order. Having said that, he was mightily concerned by his first look at the Prospect ground. The Aussie Rules season had just been completed (to the average uninformed Englishman, ‘rules’ seems a loose concept in that game). ‘The whole playing area had been top-dressed,’ he said. ‘Basically it was covered in sand.’ Slow outfield then? ‘Huh. I scored a hundred and only managed two fours.’ That certainly would not have impressed South Australia’s latest overseas signing – the reason you have fours, and sixes, is to save running between the wickets.

Club cricket, coaching and the odd promotional appearance for his sponsors aside, Barry’s true purpose was to win the Sheffield Shield for South Australia. No one man can win a cricket game but if anyone dominated the Shield in Australia during the 1970/71 season it was Barry Richards. In 16 innings, he hit 1,538 runs at an average of 109.86. Positively Bradmanesque, you might say. The comparison with The Don is not by the by; South Australia was his home state and he alone, among many other records to his name, had scored a century against all opponents in one season. That was until Barry’s annus mirabilis. Barry scored a century against each state, plus two against the touring Englishmen for good measure. These six hundreds comprised four singles, one double and one triple. That is why Bradman, having watched one of Barry’s early-season centuries in Adelaide, told the rest of Australia, ‘Don’t fail to see this young man bat when he comes here.’

Barry’s first appearance in the red cap of South Australia was in a limited overs match against Victoria. He scored a duck. That concerned him less than the strange sight of Bill Lawry doing a jig on the pitch following Barry’s dismissal. Perhaps, if you had been in Lawry’s shoes, you too might have done the same. Barry, possibly more than anyone in that South African team, had knocked the stuffing out of the Australians the previous winter and left Lawry, the captain, feeling as powerless as a general who’s run out of ammunition.

The dam did not burst on that occasion, nor did it in Barry’s Shield debut against Western Australia. He was dismissed for seven, by McKenzie of all people, whose reputation he had almost destroyed in his onslaught in that previous series. Just a minute, Barry. I see you bowled ten overs and took 3-29. You were picked for South Australia as a spinner but you couldn’t get a bowl for your club side. Grade cricket must have been very strong back then. He laughed ruefully. ‘So it seemed. And I got reminded about it too.’ He did score 44 not out in the second innings as the match petered out in a draw but it hardly merited more than a chime from one of the 749 bell towers in Adelaide, the city of churches.

That was saved for a few days later, against the touring MCC. The English team, under Illingworth, went on to reclaim the Ashes that season, their first win on Australian soil since Hutton’s side of 1954/55. That was a considerable achievement and Illingworth justifiably earned much praise for the way in which he instilled discipline and a hunger for success in a disparate band of talented mavericks, including John Snow and Geoff Boycott. But they played an attritional brand of cricket that did not meet with universal approval by the Australian media and public. Illingworth didn’t care one jot. He was a Yorkshireman and they don’t do frivolity and entertainment; they just get the job done, whatever it takes.

Now, as it happens, Barry’s approach to the game was the antithetical opposite to Illingworth’s; his lips would curl at the safety first mindset of the professional English cricketer. Barry did do frivolity and entertainment, as we already know. He could knuckle down and grind it out if the situation demanded but his natural inclination was to attack. ‘I played my shots,’ he always said. And ironically – for Boycott always admired Barry’s technical skill and dazzling genius – it is Boycott that Barry always holds up as the type of batsman he could never have been. ‘I wasn’t really a stats man, like Boycs,’ he said. ‘Run-gathering was never my motivation. I always looked on batting as an entertainment rather than a numbers game.’ You would have scored a hundred hundreds if you had. He sighed. ‘When I look back and consider the times I gave it away in the 70s and 80s…’

When you consider his innings for South Australia against MCC – he scored 224 – you have to say that on this occasion, he did not give it away. ‘Oh yes I did! I was out on the last ball of the innings, having a slog. We were going to declare so a four would have been more important to the team than a dot ball and a not out to my name.’ And then, as an afterthought, he pointed out that his season’s enormous average of 109.86 would have been boosted even more had he blocked that last ball from D’Oliveira, which slightly undermines his claim that he had little interest in figures. Let’s just say that he was less obsessed by his average than most top-class players and certainly a great deal less than Boycott. Boycott had batted all day for 173 after MCC had won the toss. It had been a typical Boycott innings, marked by patience, determination, courage and technical skill, one such that his country had come to be hugely grateful for on many occasions. But it was not a Richards innings.

After play had ended that day, Barry was surprised, and not a little indignant, to see Boycott, who was not out overnight, drag some net bowlers – what we would have called club and ground bowlers – into the nets for some practice. He’s been out there all day boring the pants off us, thought Barry, and now he’s going to smack a few club players around. I’ll show him how to bat. Incidentally, Boycott was out first thing the next morning without adding to his score. And Barry did show everyone, including Boycott, how to bat. He was 100 not out at the close of play and yes, his innings had been quite different. ‘I played a few shots,’ he said, a trifle unnecessarily, ‘and it just went on from there the next day.’ The local paper put it more colourfully, “One hundred degrees in the shade and climbing and 200 for Richards in the middle and climbing!”’

What does he make of his scores of 51 and 42 against Victoria, relative failures in this season of plenty? ‘Stupid shots at stupid times,’ was his uncompromising verdict. Thomson got you in the first innings. Now, he was a strange bowler, wasn’t he? ‘Froggy Thomson, not Jeff Thomson.’ His nickname stemmed from his peculiar hop and a jump as he bowled off the wrong foot. Most batsmen who faced him found him awkward and difficult to work out. Not Barry. ‘I had a bit of an advantage over the others. I was used to facing Prockie and though he didn’t actually bowl off the wrong foot, as many people believed, he did have a similar funny jump to Froggy as he got into his delivery stride.’

Thomson tended to blow hot and cold that summer. He is better known for bowling an over of bouncers at Illingworth in one of the Tests and giving the same treatment to John Snow. This did not impress England’s poet and paceman, not so much that Froggy had let him have a few but that he got no warning from the umpire, whereas Snow had been repeatedly warned for short-pitched bowling throughout the series. Thereafter, Froggy slowly receded from view on the international scene.

Barry was not going to recede from anyone’s view. As the team flew into Perth, he felt happy with his focus and form and believed he was more than justifying the faith and confidence that had been invested in him. At that time, Perth (usually referred to as the WACA) had the reputation of preparing the fastest and bounciest pitch in the world. When he first cast his eyes on the wicket, Barry knew straight away that the pitch’s reputation for pace would be wholly merited. It was hard and shiny, so much so that conventional studs did not do the trick; sometimes you would slip as if you were playing on glass, he recalled. The most effective boots for those conditions were the light, cut-down ones with moulded studs that were spiky and sharp, more so than the conventional ankle-high boots with screw-in studs. At practice in the nets the day before, his eyes were opened – literally – by the way the ball flew off the pitch. ‘But the thing was,’ he said, ‘the bounce was entirely true. Once you got used to it, you could trust your judgement and play your shots.’

The following day witnessed one of the most glorious exhibitions of classical strokeplay in the history of the game. It is to be admitted that such a claim is a brave one. We can all bring to mind great innings that deserve that accolade for different reasons – the state of the game, the quality of the bowling, the vagaries of the wicket, the importance of the contest, even the emotional pull of the occasion. But for sheer technical perfection and total mastery of the bowlers and the conditions, it is doubtful that this innings has ever been bettered. A few statistics first: his first hundred came after 125 minutes, his second after 209 and his third after 317, comprising 39 fours and a six. At close of play on the first day, South Australia were 513/3, Richards 325 not out. Incredible. And yet again, we have to make do with the fact that innings in those days were measured in time spent at the crease, not the number of balls faced. We do know that no one had ever scored so many runs in one day, not even Bradman. This record was broken by Brian Lara in 1994 in the process of amassing his famous 501 not out for Warwickshire. He made 390 that day but it should be borne in mind that rain had ruined the match as a contest and the Durham attack had been weakened by injury. Let me state immediately that the Western Australian attack was most certainly not weak; they had bowlers of the calibre of McKenzie, Lillee, Mann and Lock. They all finished with three figures against their name for runs conceded, a statistic that all bowlers dread.

Funnily enough, it very nearly didn’t happen. Graham McKenzie wrote to me about that day, ‘I bowled the first ball to him in that innings. The ball swung away and he played and missed. I remember Ian Brayshaw at mid-on asking me how it looked, to which I replied that it looked like a good day to bowl! That was the first and last ball to beat the bat all day. It was the most memorable long innings I was to see in all my days playing cricket.’ For the record, McKenzie played in 60 Tests, so he witnessed quite a few in his career. Rodney Marsh, the wicketkeeper, later admitted that after that first ball, he turned to John Inverarity at slip and remarked, ‘Hello, this fellow isn’t as good as they’re all saying he is.’

However, he had to eat his words; Marsh always said that he kept immaculately that day, the reason being that he took the ball behind the stumps on very few occasions throughout all three sessions. Greg Chappell’s recollections were this, ‘Either Barry hit them for four or he pushed the ball back to the bowler as if to say, hurry up and bowl me another one that I can hit for four.’ His brother, Ian, scored 129 at the other end ‘and his innings was hardly noticed’. Tony Mann, the Western Australian leg-spinner, wrote in an article later, ‘Richards placed the ball magnificently – minimal footwork, brilliant eye, very strong wrists. He just caressed the ball to the boundary rope, no big hitting at all. That was his trademark, finding the gaps.’ Inverarity simply said this, ‘It was the only occasion in my life where I began to enjoy an opposition batsman making a lot of runs. It was just sublime. He was toying with the bowlers.’ The last words of the admiring Australians ought to go to Barry’s friend and team-mate, Greg Chappell. ‘Barry looked like a man batting against boys.’

Even in the tranquillity of recollection, Barry cannot spell out the reasons for his great innings; why, at this time and in this place, for a short period in his career, he played like a god. All he can say is that once he had got used to the bounce, he felt secure enough with his technique to play his shots. And as it was a fast outfield, the ball flew to the boundary – 39 times. Strangely, he cleared the ropes only once. How come, Barry? After all, you were never afraid to go the aerial route. ‘Long boundaries, buddy.’ Fair enough. Much better to hit the gaps. Sometimes, when someone is playing on a different plane to the rest of you, there just doesn’t seem to be enough fielders out there.

I’ve never seen any footage of the innings. Were there any cameras there? ‘Only a couple of minutes taken on one of those old 8mm home cameras.’ A shame, but I don’t need celluloid evidence; I can see, in my mind’s eye, the last ball of the day, as described by the batsman himself. Many times I’ve seen the stroke, the follow through, the confident stride back to the pavilion. ‘As Lillee bowled the last ball of the day, I walked down the wicket, drove the ball down the wicket past him for four and carried on walking towards the pavilion.’ And as he did so and the Western Australian team followed, Inverarity turned to Marsh and, mindful of the wicketkeeper’s initial judgement that morning after McKenzie’s first ball, said, ‘I suppose he can play a bit!’

The following day, Barry batted for a further 42 minutes and who knows what records he had in his sights before the fickle finger of fate, namely the umpire’s raised digit, put the Western Australian side out of their misery. ‘It was a shocking decision,’ said Barry, the indignation still raw. ‘Mann bowled me a googly. I knew it was a googly, I saw it. I missed it sweeping and it hit me on the boot. It was clearly going down the leg side. But the umpire gave me out. Probably sick and tired of the sight of me.’ Tony Mann later became a good friend and to this day they both laugh about it. But there it is in the book: B.A. Richards lbw b Mann 356.

It is not unknown for a batsman in a run glut to suffer a drought after a major innings such as that. But Barry was not made of ordinary stuff. MCC made a return visit to the Adelaide Oval and it was a further opportunity to parade his skills against a team of Test players. Yet again, he played as if an international attack comprising Lever, Shuttleworth, Willis, D’Oliveira and Underwood were club bowlers. His hundred came off 131 balls. There was no double hundred this time. He was stumped by Taylor off Underwood for 146. ‘I had a slog at Deadly in the last over of the day and paid the price.’ Many have, and paid the price too, I told him, but still he was cross with himself. He was less cross for getting out for 35 in the next match against Queensland. ‘The struggle is to get from nought to 50,’ he said.

During the Christmas period, Barry took a well-earned break from run-making. You note I use the idiom ‘run-making’, not ‘run-gathering’. His scores so far during this remarkable season may have resembled those of an insatiable run machine such as Bradman, Hanif, Tendulkar, Lara, Kallis and Cook but Richards and a machine are two concepts as contrasting as papist and puritan. He needed a bit of a holiday. People do not realise that cricket is a draining physical and mental activity. In England, where the game is played daily for the best part of six months, without a break, it can be gruelling and eventually enervating, as Barry was slowly to discover playing for Hampshire. But in the southern hemisphere, there is the opportunity for a rest over the Christmas holiday. Time for a few braais, eh? ‘I never did manage to convert them to use the word braai instead of barbie,’ he confessed sadly.

It being the school holidays, it was also a rest from coaching, which can get a bit monotonous, no matter how talented are the boys you have in the nets. And on his own admission, Barry preferred the fine-tuning of a sound technique and a special talent to merely supervising a gaggle of bored kids. The tedium of long car journeys between towns was alleviated by the company of Greg Chappell who was engaged on a similar contract with Coca-Cola. Greg’s memories of these months together are warm and affectionate. There was one occasion when he and Barry were driving from one school to the next on the schedule. It was not just an hour or two on the road. We’re talking about Australia here, where distances are vast. They were in fact travelling out of New South Wales and into the adjoining state of Victoria. Furthermore, whoever had arranged the visit had neglected to take into consideration that there is a time change of half an hour between the two states. Once they realised, Greg had to put his foot down to try and make up the lost time.

Barry was not best pleased. In fact, he was disgruntled, mightily cheesed off, you might say. ‘Barry was complaining about how hard they had made it for us,’ recounted Greg. ‘And then we noticed two railway workers on a cart on the railway line running parallel with the road. It was one of those carts that has a hand generated mechanism, much like a see-saw, which the guys were pumping like mad to move this thing along the track at good speed. Barry completed his outburst. I pointed to the two guys on the hand trolley and said which would you rather be – us or them? We both laughed and decided that life wasn’t so bad after all.’ And did Barry complain again? ‘Nope.’

It didn’t stop with humorous conversation in the car. Barry is a serious student of the game and a knowledgeable conduit of information and advice – for those prepared to listen. Greg Chappell was prepared to listen all right, ‘To be able to spend hours together talking cricket, mainly batting, I was able to get a different perspective from someone other than my father and brother. Barry was a tall and upright, driving batsman like me as opposed to the back foot, cross-bat player Ian was. Because we were coaching young cricketers, I had to think about why I did certain things and whether they could be done differently. To listen to Barry explaining batting each day was very educational for me as a player and budding coach.’

Chappell’s words set me thinking. For whatever reason, Barry was definitely under-utilised at Hampshire in the nets. I do not mean that he should have been designated an official coach – he would never have wanted that role anyway – but his advice and his help could have been sought on a much more regular basis. Perhaps this was our fault for not asking. Perhaps it was the club’s fault for not demanding (with more pay, of course!). Or perhaps, with the busy schedule and relentless travelling of a county cricketer, Barry simply cherished his intermittent periods ‘off duty’. One of the joys of playing in those days was the opportunity to chat to, and to pick the brains of, great players over a drink in the bar after the close of play, much as Greg Chappell was doing during those hours together in the car.

Barry rarely stayed for long after a game and if he did, the last thing he wanted to talk about was cricket. Of course we all had eyes in our head and could watch the master batsman go about his daily business but still, some of us to this day kick ourselves for not being more questioning and probing. Barry was – is – a fine analyst of the technical side of the game; he was a craftsman as well as a genius. In fact it is my contention that you cannot be one without having the basic framework of the other. You have to know the rules before you can break them. Picasso could draw according to classical principles before he went off on his journey through abstract impressionism, surrealism and ultimately cubism. To illustrate my point, Barry Richards, the very exemplification of orthodoxy, was playing the ramp shot, the reverse sweep and the paddle long before they were ‘invented’. He was an improviser as well as a purist.

Let me furnish you with an example. It was a long time ago and the details of the occasion are a little blurry around the edges. It was a charity game. Barry opened the batting. The crowd had come to see him. Opening the bowling was a chap known to us; he had played in a few Second XI matches. His name was Bell. We had no idea whether he had a Christian name; he was known to one and all as Dinger. Now Dinger rather fancied himself as a fast bowler. He had all the necessary accoutrements of a fast bowler, piratical beard, long run up, malevolent glare, dictionary of swear words, but he lacked one crucial weapon in his armoury, namely pace. He thought he was fast, and in club cricket he probably was considered to be a bit sharpish. But there is a world of difference between a club quickie and the real thing.

First ball, he gave Barry a bouncer, not a terrifying one but at least it got up high enough for Barry to sway out of the way. Dinger gave Barry the stare. Barry opened his eyes wide, in astonishment or for the first time that day, it was not possible to say. Predictably, the next ball was a bouncer. Barry stepped inside the line and flicked – there is no other word for it – the ball over his shoulder, over the wicketkeeper’s head and over the boundary. That shot today is known as the ‘ramp’ but no one had ever heard of that word back then. But Barry was playing shots like that long before T20.

On the resumption of the Sheffield Shield, it soon became clear that any Christmas indulgence had not dulled Barry’s appetite for Australian bowling. The Gabba in Brisbane had a reputation for being a little ‘fiery’, as he described it, certainly early on. It could have been ablaze for all the difference it made to his form; he scored 155. Interestingly enough, he did not have it entirely his own way. Tony Dell – born in Lymington, a beautiful, Georgian market town on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire of all counties – was an awkward, left-arm fast bowler, ‘useful’ in Barry’s lexicon. Of all the bowlers he faced in that season, Dell gave Barry the most trouble. I have this from the mouth of Greg Chappell. ‘Dell was the only one whom I saw make Barry change his initial footwork. Barry always expected and looked for the full ball and was ready to launch forward at it but Tony’s angle, left-arm over, and his good bouncer, made Barry hang back more. He never got him out but he did make him more uncomfortable than anyone else.’ Barry still made 155, his century coming up in only 130 balls.

There was another sad end during this match. Or rather funny – it depends on your viewpoint. Barry takes up the story, ‘We were having fielding practice. Someone called for a bat to hit catches so Eric Freeman went into the dressing room and grabbed the first bat he could lay his hands on. After six hits, the bat broke in half. It was my bat!’ No! Not the…the… ‘Yup. My 356 bat.’ Oh dear, that’s tragic. ‘They managed to glue it together and now it’s in a glass case in the museum.’ Well, we all end up in a box, don’t we? When I had stopped laughing, my mind went off at a tangent.

How far can I go in comparing a cricket bat with a musical instrument, say a violin? Both, wielded by a virtuoso, can produce a performance of distinction and grandeur. Both are made from wood, not any old branch fallen from a tree in the garden but from special timber, willow and cane for a bat, maple and spruce for a violin. Both are fashioned with great care and attention to detail by skilled craftsmen and when finished are perfectly balanced, exquisitely carved and elegantly shaped artefacts of rare beauty, to the eye and to the touch. Both, at the top end of the range, are fabulously expensive, though it has to be said that the hole in your pocket after you have purchased the most expensive bat on the market, a £1,000 Newbery Cenkos, is as nothing to the cavern in your bank account if you want to get your hands on the priceless ‘Lady Blunt’ Stradivarius. In actual fact, it does have a price; in 2011, it was bought for a staggering £10m. In America. Where else?

Are these costly pieces of equipment worth it? Probably not. After all, it is said that Denis Compton, awakened from his slumbers in the dressing room, would grab hold of any bat from the nearest kit bag and go out there to play the most magical of innings. And I daresay Nicola Benedetti could produce a half decent tune on a dusty old instrument from the cupboard in the school music department. But that is not really the point. Great performers need the finest implements, the better to lay on an exhibition of their special talent before the public. And what’s more, they become used to their favourite tool; it becomes like an old friend, familiar, comfortable and perfectly proportioned, almost an extension of the arm. Of course, the inescapable dissimilarity is that a bat comes into frequent contact with a hard ball – sometimes windows, balustrades and dressing room doors as well – and its lifespan is perforce limited. Just imagine a virtuoso smashing his violin in fury over the conductor’s podium because he had hit a bum note. But the demise of a favourite bat can result in wretchedness and desolation for a batsman, even to the extent that it ruins his recent run of good form.

Did the expiry of the 356 bat affect Barry’s form? Not a bit of it. I reckon he could have picked up any discarded plank, left behind in the nets at one of the schools where he coached, and still scored a ton. He was in that sort of form and that sort of mood. He placed his trust in a replacement Gray Nicholls and a few days later, the New South Wales bowlers became better acquainted than they would have wished with the bat’s distinct logo. Of his team’s total of 316, he made 178. The next highest score was 48. His memories of the match have little to do with his innings. He was greatly impressed by the new boots the NSW captain, John Benaud (brother of Richie), was wearing. ‘They were these new Adidas, low cut ones, with moulded soles and those sharp spikes rather than studs.’ Remembering how he had difficulties in keeping his balance on the shiny, rock hard surface at the WACA, he thought these were ideal. It was not long before he too was wearing them.

New bat. New boots. Same old outcome. Against Victoria, it was 105 in the first innings and 72 in the second. He made nothing of the historical significance of the century. He had now joined The Don as the only batsman to score a hundred against all opposing teams in the same season. He had scored six, one a double and another a triple, but a noteworthy fact of the feat was that five of the six were among the ten fastest centuries of the season. In other words, he had not simply ground out the runs with machine-like efficiency. He had held true to his credo of entertainment throughout all the abundance of runs and records.

Notwithstanding the hullabaloo surrounding his extraordinary feats, it has to be remembered that cricket is a team game and South Australia had a shield to win. It all boiled down to the final match against New South Wales in Adelaide. For once, Barry did not carry all before him, single-handedly hauling his team over the line. It was a marvellous, sustained performance with the ball by Eric Freeman (13 wickets in the match), which secured the match and the Sheffield Shield for the home side. In his first innings, Barry had been struck a painful blow on the finger by a ball that reared off a length. He carried on batting but with increasing discomfort. Not surprising really, because later investigation revealed that the finger had been broken.

He wasn’t supposed to bat in the second innings. However, Ian Chappell wanted quick runs to make a declaration with the purpose of giving his side sufficient time to bowl the other side out but his strategy was being derailed by a leg-spinner called Geoff Davies, who had taken five quick wickets. Needs must, so Barry, with his hand heavily strapped, emerged from the pavilion at number nine, a unique experience, as far as he can remember. He played one-handed, the left hand, the top hand. You could say that those countless hours in the nets as a boy, with Alan Butler beseeching him to play the correct way, with the top hand in control, now paid off. Somehow he managed to hit a few fours through the covers before ruthlessness was restored. Dave Renneberg, the fast bowler, was recalled to the attack and promptly hit Barry on the broken finger. Common sense prevailed and he retired hurt, the necessary quick runs having been garnered. Freeman bowled them out and victory and celebration was secured.

Statistics can tell a story but as with any story, it’s all about how you tell ’em. Here is a detail, however, that is incontrovertible. Barry’s aggregate for the season was 1,538 runs at an average of 109.86. I have already described that feat as Bradmanesque, and not idly so either. The record for the number of runs scored in a Sheffield Shield season is 1,690 by, yes, you have guessed it, Don Bradman, in 1928/29. Barry merely said that it was ‘an honour’ to be even mentioned in the same breath as The Don. As it happens, the respect between the two men was mutual. Bradman made no secret of his admiration. Adelaide was his home and at the time he was chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, much involved in the administration of the game and well acquainted with the modern player. He was a firm believer in brighter cricket and a tireless champion of the attacking, positive player who would entertain the paying public.

Barry, therefore, was right up his street. So much so that he said this of him, ‘Barry Richards is the world’s best right-hand opening batsman.’ And he put his money where his mouth was, so to speak, by naming Barry in his world’s best ever team. As he had included seven Australians, one of whom was himself, which I doubt anyone could disagree with, there wasn’t much room for other nationalities. Barry is South African and had only played four Tests, so this was indeed an accolade of the highest order. Bradman wasn’t finished there. ‘Richards,’ he said, ‘was one of the best players of the short ball, opener or otherwise, ever.’

This is a question whose answer I can probably guess but I shall ask it nonetheless. Did you enjoy your time in Australia? ‘Loved it!’ Australia is not unlike South Africa climatically and Australians are not unlike South Africans socially so his Adelaide adventure was no journey into the unknown. He didn’t need two sweaters for a start and Sheffield Shield cricket was similar in standard and intensity to the Currie Cup. Furthermore, his girlfriend, Lorna, had joined him from home. He could not have been more contented. Not for the first time, an identifiable connection between a sportsman’s equanimity in his personal life and his performances on the field of play could be contended. Life was good. And he would be back the next season, this time playing for South Africa.

Or would he? Those in the country with more finely tuned political antennae than Barry were beginning to doubt that the tour could possibly take place, despite assurances from Bradman and the ACB that it must go ahead because ‘politics should not come into sport’. Many Australians agreed with him though an increasingly vociferous and militant number did not. So, as Barry prepared to leave Adelaide, the decision was still in the balance. ‘Strange though it may seem,’ he said, ‘I still believed that it would take place. It’s not as if we had sat on our backsides and did nothing.’

A grateful South Australian Cricket Association, together with his sponsor, Coca-Cola, put on a celebratory dinner at which Barry was presented with awards and mementoes and listened with crimson ears to some laudatory comments in a speech from The Don. On a more personal level, he had made a good friend of Greg Chappell. ‘I look back on that season with much fondness,’ Chappell said, ‘I learnt a lot from working and playing with Barry and we formed a lifelong friendship that endures to this day.’ When Australia toured England in 1975 and the tourists played Hampshire at Southampton, the warmth of the greeting and the firmness of the handshake – even if Barry was wearing those trendy boxing gloves that masqueraded as batting gloves – between the two of them was unmistakeably genuine. ‘We’re still in touch,’ Barry assured me, ‘and just take off from where we last left off. Loves his golf. He’s a good guy.’

How did you find his brother, Ian? ‘Tough as nails. He wouldn’t entertain any talk of a nightwatchman, a principle that still holds firm in the Aussie Test teams of today. If a recognised batsman is due in, that’s when he should go in. That’s his job. That was Ian’s view. Mind you, as a captain, he would never ask you to do something that he wasn’t prepared to do himself. He spoke his mind, Ian, and was prepared to take on the Australian cricket authorities, leading right up to the Packer confrontation.’ Barry, too, it would seem, was not afraid to give his opinion in the dressing room, and forcefully too, on occasions. ‘But we didn’t mind that,’ said Greg. ‘How could we? After all, I had a brother who was the same and he was the captain of the side! No, Barry got on well with all his team-mates.’

And it seemed that the impression he had made on the South Australian public was equally positive. After the Shield had been won and Barry was on his way, the Adelaide Advertiser printed a whole page with the simple banner headline: ‘Thank you, Barry’.

Back to England and the vagaries of early season weather? No, it seemed there was an important matter to attend to in South Africa first. When he arrived home, he found a sporting fraternity submerged in gloom. The very real prospect of sporting isolation was beginning to take root in everybody’s mind. As it happened, the Springbok rugby team were in Australia at the time and suffering the same sort of unfriendly welcome and violent protest that they had encountered on their tour of the British Isles two years earlier. Grounds had to be protected with six foot barbed wire barricades, police were struggling to protect the visitors as they made their way around the country, a near riot in Melbourne had only been averted by a baton charge, the cost of security was rocketing and even the rugby players were becoming dispirited by the hostile environment enveloping them. ‘Pox on the Boks’ was one of the more printable placards that greeted them wherever they went.

To most people, the facts were starkly apparent; if it took this much trouble to ensure a rugby match of 80 minutes took place, what chance was there of securing a five-day Test match? But still, the South African Cricket Association were insistent that the 1971/72 tour of Australia would go ahead. Were they out of their minds? Something had to be done. And it was the players themselves who took it upon themselves to make some sort of demonstration.

Transvaal, the current Currie Cup champions, were scheduled to play a match against the Rest. This was now in early April 1971 and was intended as part celebration for the ten years since the republic had been formed and part trial for the touring party. Barry had been selected for Transvaal. But you were a Natalian. What were you doing playing for a rival province? ‘I know. But I was only a guest player. It was only a trial really. I’d just flown in the day before. I was knackered.’ Both teams discussed the worsening political situation before the match. ‘Trouble had been brewing for a while,’ said Vintcent van der Bijl, who was playing for the Rest. ‘After the Sharpeville Massacre, we knew that it could only end in tears.’ At a political demonstration in 1960, police had opened fire and killed 69 blacks. It was a watershed moment in the history of apartheid. It signalled a hardening of the government policy of separate development and the banning of organisations such as the African National Congress. Consequently, the strategy of passive resistance among the black population moved towards armed protest. And the liberals among the white population – the group from which cricketers largely came – were caught between a rock and a hard place.

‘Before the match,’ said van der Bijl, ‘we knew that the tour to Australia was in jeopardy.’ He remembers everybody meeting in a pub to discuss what to do. ‘We all knew the system was unjust,’ said Lee Irvine, ‘but we didn’t know about the worst excesses. The truth was hidden from us. But we had to do something.’ Barry believed it all boiled down to the tensions between the Afrikaners and the English. ‘The government was Afrikaans. They didn’t much care for cricket. Rugby was their thing. If the cricket tour was called off, all they would have done was shrug their shoulders.’ There was not total agreement among the players what form their protest should take. Some were all for boycotting the match altogether but Charles Fortune, a broadcaster known as the voice of South African cricket, dissuaded them from taking such drastic action.

‘Think of the paying customer,’ he urged. ‘A lot of people have paid a lot of money to watch you fellows tomorrow.’ So they all came to the decision that they would walk off after one ball and hand a letter of protest to the authorities. And then they would resume playing. ‘Look,’ said Fred Goldstein, another of the players, ‘if this is just about getting to Australia, I want no part of it. If it’s a genuine protest, count me in.’

When you read the content of the open letter, I don’t think there could be any doubt that it was a genuine protest, ‘We cricketers feel that the time has come for an expression of our views. We fully support the South African Cricket Association’s application to invite non-whites to tour Australia if they are good enough and further subscribe to merit being the only criterion on the cricket field.’

Barry does not want to take any of the credit but Graeme Pollock, captain of the Rest, said afterwards that the protest was led, in the main, by Barry Richards and Mike Procter. Significantly, both players were currently engaged by English counties and played daily with and against black cricketers.

Transvaal won the toss and Barry walked out to bat and his old friend Mike Procter marked out his run. Procter charged in and Barry nudged him for a single. Procter stood in the middle of the wicket with a look of surprise and disgust on his face. ‘What did you do that for?’ he demanded as Barry sauntered past. ‘I thought we’d agreed to walk off after one ball.’ ‘I’m on a rand a run, buddy,’ grinned Barry. ‘Every one counts!’

Then, to the astonishment of the crowd, all the players trooped off the field. The manager of the Rest handed the statement, signed by all the players, to an official of SACA. After a few minutes, the players returned and the match resumed. What sort of stir did it cause? ‘Massive, man, massive. All the press were there and soon the place was humming.’ What were the immediate consequences? ‘Well, we knew we weren’t very popular. A reception that evening, to be hosted by the minister for sport, was immediately cancelled.’ Did it make any difference? He gave that some thought. ‘I suppose it changed nothing. But it gave everybody something to chew over. The politicians hammered us.’ Irvine went further. ‘We were accused of being complacent. We weren’t. We did protest and it was a brave thing to do in a police state. We did what we could. Not enough perhaps but those bleating about half-measures weren’t in our shoes.’

Did it save the tour? No. Most knew that the tour was probably doomed. But SACA carried on as if oblivious to political reality. Bradman, and the ACB were still, at this stage, frantically negotiating with the South African government and SACA to see whether anything could be salvaged from the mess. The tour team was announced and caps and blazers issued – ‘those distinctive green stripy ones’ said Barry. ‘I’d love to know what happened to them.’ Bacher was to lead the side, with Barlow as his vice-captain, with the usual suspects in attendance, the Pollocks, Lindsay, Richards, Procter, Irvine, Lance, but even arguably stronger this time with the inclusion of the new, young fast bowlers Clive Rice and Vintcent van der Bijl. It was a team to excite the imagination of any cricketing public but no one seriously believed that it would ever assemble.

The tipping point came during a diplomatic mission to South Africa by Don Bradman himself. A meeting was arranged between him and John Vorster, the South African prime minister. The meeting swiftly became tense, then sour. Bradman asked some fairly blunt questions about blacks being denied the opportunity to represent their country. When Vorster replied that was because blacks were intellectually inferior and couldn’t be expected to cope with the intricacies of the game, Bradman replied grimly, ‘Have you never heard of Garry Sobers?’ Apparently, that one bitter exchange convinced Bradman that he was spitting into the wind and his mind was made up, there and then. On his return to Australia, it was but a short meeting with his colleagues before he issued publicly this one-sentence statement, ‘We will not play South Africa until they choose a team on a non-racist basis.’ The door on future sporting connections with South Africa had finally been slammed shut and was not to be opened again for another 21 years.

What was your reaction this time around? ‘No great surprise. We all had to deal with our crushing disappointment individually and in our own way. I hoped against hope that something could be saved but as one year went by, then another, then another, the realisation sank in that it was never going to happen.’ Barry found the international isolation very hard to bear and it took him years to reach any sort of acceptance or inner peace about what had befallen him. Others found it easier to rationalise the situation. Van der Bijl is in no doubt that isolation was good for the country and hastened the dismantling of apartheid, which would lead to total integration in sport. Irvine continued the good fight, to explore any loopholes in the law to make some sort of difference to inter-racial cricket but, in the end, after he found his phone had been tapped and he was beginning to receive non-specific threats from shadowy authority figures, he decided the safety of his family was more important, so he was forced to sit it out and wait for better days. ‘Was the ban worth it? Yes! Otherwise the government would never have listened. I had my personal regrets, of course, but the bigger picture was more important.’

Barry has never doubted for one moment that the ban was morally right and changed things for the better in the long run. But he seemed to suffer from the effects more than most, in his spirit and in his heart. Gradually, he became more and more demoralised and the game of cricket, which defined him, slowly lost its allure until, in the end, he no longer wanted to play. Why was he hit particularly hard, I wondered. I have a theory, one that Barry might well shoot down, but like others in the Hampshire dressing room, I needed to understand the mood of despondency that seemed to envelop him in the dressing room. Yes, an hour or two of Richards batting like a god was a privilege to witness but if he wasn’t enjoying it, then what was the point? It wasn’t until I finished playing professionally that I began to understand. Like a lot of players who used to play for a living, I found it difficult to adjust to the lower tier of the game. Some club cricket is of a pretty high standard and there are some good teams out there but it wasn’t the same. I found the excitement and the motivation had gone and it was not long before I was looking around for other outlets for my competitive instincts.

In many ways, I envied my brother who did not play at such a high level as me but he found his niche and continued to enjoy playing for his club until well into his fifties. Barry missed the stimulation of Test cricket, the challenge, the thrill, the elation, the sense of fulfilment. When that was snatched away from him, everything else seemed so banal and run of the mill. But unlike his contemporaries in that South African team, who were amateurs and had careers to pursue, he was a professional. He had to carry on playing. It was his job. He had no other. And with the bright lights of the West End fading from view, he had to make do with lesser roles touring the provinces – Basingstoke, Ebbw Vale, Glastonbury, Southport, Harrogate, Darley Dale, Guildford, Westcliffe on Sea, Kidderminster, Dover…for all he cared, they might just as well have nipped across the Channel and played in Calais. And through all this, he was expected to smile and smile and smile again, all the time grinding out the big scores and pretending that he was enjoying it. And Barry has always been hopeless at pretending. Yes, we must weep also for the lost generations of black cricketers in his country but it would be churlish not to weep too for the lost genius of one man.

By the way, Barry’s scores in the ‘protest’ match were 140 and 67. Truly, this had been an annus mirabilis. Don Bradman was distraught over the cancellation of the tour. He was in no doubt of the ramifications of the decision, necessary though it was. ‘It was one of the saddest days of my life,’ he later said. ‘It meant the end of Barry Richards’s Test career.’