History of South African Cricket: Isolation and Return

In March 1970 South Africa beat Australia by 323 runs at Port Elizabeth to complete a four-nil series win. It was the fourth Test of a series in which the margins had been enormous. The side contained Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards, two of the finest batters anyone had seen, alongside Mike Procter, Eddie Barlow, Peter Pollock and Denis Lindsay. Most judges at the time thought it was the best team in the world, or close enough that the argument was worth having.

That was the last Test South Africa played for twenty-one years and eight months. The team was not beaten. It was removed.

This page follows the national side from the post-war revival through isolation, the rebel tours, readmission and the modern era. How the game arrived at the Cape, how the Currie Cup and the separate leagues were built, and how the colour line was drawn in the first place are covered separately in our account of the origin of cricket in South Africa.

Recovery in the 1950s

South Africa emerged from the Second World War with a poor Test record and a domestic structure that had barely functioned for six years. What followed was the first sustained period in which the side was genuinely competitive against the strongest opposition.

The turning point was the 1952-53 tour of Australia. South Africa were expected to be overwhelmed and instead drew the series two-all, a result so unexpected that some Australian writers treated it as an accident for years afterward. The captain, Jack Cheetham, built the side around fielding standards that were far ahead of the period, on the reasoning that a team without great players could not afford to give anything away. Russell Endean, John Waite and Roy McLean made runs. Hugh Tayfield took the wickets.

Tayfield

Hugh Tayfield was an off-spinner of extraordinary control who bowled long spells at a defensive length with an attacking field and made batters take risks against him out of sheer boredom. He took 37 wickets in the 1956-57 home series against England, including nine for 113 in the fourth Test at the Wanderers, and finished with 170 Test wickets in a career of only 37 matches.

South Africa drew that series two-all after being two down, and lost narrowly in England in 1955 in a five-Test rubber that swung repeatedly. Neither result made them the best side in the world. Both established that they belonged in the conversation, which had not been true since the googly bowlers of half a century earlier.

The team of 1970

The side that assembled through the 1960s was different in kind.

Trevor Goddard captained through the early part of the decade, and in 1966-67 Peter van der Merwe led South Africa to a three-one home win over Australia, the first series victory over the Australians in either country. Denis Lindsay kept wicket and scored heavily enough in that series to be the deciding factor in it. Three years later the same fixture produced a four-nil result in South Africa's favour, and the margins were not close.

Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards

Graeme Pollock was a left-hander from Port Elizabeth who played 23 Tests and finished with a batting average a fraction under 61, a figure bettered only by Don Bradman among batters with a substantial career. He made 274 at Kingsmead in the 1970 series, which stood for many years as the highest score by a South African. He was 26 when the door closed.

Barry Richards played four Tests. He scored 508 runs in them at an average above 70, and he never played another. Almost everything known about how good he was comes from county cricket for Hampshire, from a season for South Australia in which he made a hundred before lunch on the first morning against Dennis Lillee, and from the recollections of the bowlers who had to bowl at him. He is the clearest single illustration of what isolation cost, because there is no honest way to argue that four Tests measured him.

Mike Procter took 41 wickets in seven Tests bowling very fast off a chest-on action with an arm that appeared to come over late, and made more than 20,000 first-class runs. Eddie Barlow opened the batting and bowled useful seam. Peter Pollock led the attack. It was a complete side, and it lasted one series.

The D'Oliveira affair

Basil D'Oliveira was born in Cape Town in 1931 and, under South African law, was classified as coloured. He was therefore ineligible for any representative cricket that mattered in his own country. He captained a South African Cricket Board of Control side, went to England in 1960 on a Lancashire League contract, qualified for Worcestershire, and by the mid-1960s was playing Test cricket for England.

In 1968 England were due to tour South Africa. D'Oliveira made 158 against Australia at The Oval in the final Test of that summer and was left out of the touring party. The selectors gave cricketing reasons. Very few people accepted them, and the exclusion was widely understood as an attempt to avoid a confrontation with the South African government over the presence of a non-white player in the touring side.

When Tom Cartwright withdrew injured, D'Oliveira was named as his replacement. The South African prime minister, B. J. Vorster, then stated publicly that the team was no longer an MCC side but a team of the anti-apartheid movement, and that it would not be received. The tour was cancelled.

Why it mattered so much

The affair did two things at once. It forced cricket administrators in England to confront a question they had spent a decade deferring, and it demonstrated to every other cricketing nation that the South African government would apply its racial laws to visiting teams. After that, the argument was no longer about whether sporting contact with South Africa was distasteful. It was about whether it was possible.

D'Oliveira went on playing for England into the 1970s. He was not a symbol by choice and appears to have found the role uncomfortable. The confrontation happened around him rather than through any action of his own, which is part of why it was so difficult for anyone to argue with.

Twenty-one years outside

A South African tour of England was scheduled for 1970. A campaign led by the young anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain organised protests at grounds around the country, disrupting the Springbok rugby tour of the previous winter and making clear that a cricket tour would face the same treatment. The Cricket Council cancelled the tour under government pressure and replaced it with a series against a Rest of the World side.

South Africa had already left the Commonwealth in 1961, which under the rules of the day removed it from membership of the Imperial Cricket Conference. From 1970 onward no full member would play it.

Isolation on the ground

Inside the country, first-class cricket continued in a vacuum. The Currie Cup ran, standards in it remained high, and a generation of cricketers played entire careers without a Test cap. Some found a substitute in English county cricket, where South Africans were eligible as overseas players and where Procter at Gloucestershire, Richards at Hampshire, Clive Rice at Nottinghamshire and later Allan Donald at Warwickshire built substantial reputations.

There was internal opposition. In April 1971, at Newlands, players in a representative trial match walked off the field after one delivery in protest at the selection policy, an act of dissent that was startling for its time and place. Attempts to arrange multiracial matches inside South Africa were made repeatedly through the 1970s and were consistently unable to satisfy either the government or the international bodies.

The Gleneagles Agreement of 1977 committed Commonwealth governments to discouraging sporting contact with South Africa, and the United Nations maintained a register of sportspeople who had played there. The mechanism of isolation was by then formal, documented and largely effective.

The rebel tours

Between 1982 and 1990 the South African Cricket Union assembled and paid for a series of unofficial tours by privately recruited international squads. The money on offer was very large by the standards of the time, and the sanctions imposed on the players who took it varied enormously depending on which board they belonged to.

Year	Touring side	Led by	Outcome for the players
1982	England XI	Graham Gooch	Three-year Test bans
1982-83	Sri Lanka XI	Bandula Warnapura	Lengthy bans at home
1983-84, 1984-85	West Indies XI	Lawrence Rowe	Life bans from West Indian cricket
1985-86, 1986-87	Australia XI	Kim Hughes	Three-year bans
1989-90	England XI	Mike Gatting	Curtailed tour, further bans

The West Indian tours carried the heaviest personal cost. The players who went were banned for life by their board and, in several cases, effectively exiled from the societies they came from. Rowe had been one of the most admired batters in the Caribbean before he led the party and was not welcome there for many years afterward, a contrast with the English players of 1982 that is documented and stark.

The 1989-90 tour was the last and the one that ended the practice. It arrived as South Africa was beginning to change, met organised protests at every venue, was cut short, and the second tour planned for the following year was cancelled. By then the cricketers involved had become a liability to the administrators who had recruited them.

What the tours achieved

For South African cricket the rebel tours provided competitive matches and kept a generation of players in some kind of contact with international standards. They also prolonged the isolation they were designed to circumvent, hardened attitudes at the boards whose players had been bought, and produced no route back to official cricket at all. Readmission, when it came, came through political change and through the unification of the country's cricket bodies. It did not come through the tours.

Readmission

In 1991 the South African Cricket Union and the non-racial South African Cricket Board merged to form a single United Cricket Board of South Africa. In July of that year the ICC voted to readmit South Africa, and in November a South African team played a one-day international at Eden Gardens in Calcutta against India, in front of a crowd that treated the occasion as an event in itself.

The first Test back was at Bridgetown in April 1992. South Africa were in a commanding position chasing a modest target on the last morning, with the great majority of the runs still to get but eight wickets standing, and were bowled out by Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh inside a session. It was an instructive welcome.

The first years back

The side that returned was captained by Kepler Wessels, who had played Test cricket for Australia during the isolation years and then came home. It was disciplined, hard to beat and short of runs. Its central asset was fast bowling, and specifically Allan Donald.

South Africa won their first Test series back at home against India in 1992-93, drew in England in 1994 in a series that included a Test at Lord's won by an innings and a match at The Oval in which Devon Malcolm took nine wickets, and beat England at home in 1995-96 under Hansie Cronje. Within five years of returning they were a genuinely strong Test team.

1992, and the rain rule

South Africa's first World Cup was the 1992 tournament in Australia and New Zealand, and it began with a win over Australia in Sydney. They reached the semi-final, against England at the same ground.

Chasing, they needed 22 runs from 13 balls with Brian McMillan and Dave Richardson at the crease. Rain stopped play for about twelve minutes. Under the rain rule then in use, which subtracted the lowest-scoring overs of the bowling side's innings from the target, the revised equation that appeared on the scoreboard was 22 runs from one ball. There was no chance of anyone getting them and no ambiguity about the result.

The rule was indefensible and was replaced. Its successor, the Duckworth-Lewis method and later the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, exists in large part because that semi-final made the deficiency impossible to ignore. Our explainer on how Duckworth-Lewis-Stern works sets out what the current system does differently and why the old approach broke on exactly this kind of chase.

That match also created a narrative that followed South Africa for three decades, and the following ones did nothing to weaken it.

The knockout record

South African teams have won a great deal of cricket and, for a very long stretch, lost the matches that decided tournaments. The pattern is real and the reasons offered for it have never been satisfactory.

• 1996 Beaten in the quarter-final by West Indies in Karachi, where Brian Lara made 111.
• 1998 Won the inaugural ICC KnockOut in Dhaka, beating West Indies in the final. This remains one of only two global senior men's titles South Africa has won.
• 1999 Tied the semi-final against Australia at Edgbaston. Lance Klusener had batted South Africa to within one run of the target with a wicket in hand; the last-ball run-out of Donald ended it, and Australia went through on the basis of having finished ahead in the Super Six stage.
• 2003 Hosts, and eliminated at the group stage after a tied match against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead in which the batting side had been given a Duckworth-Lewis target sheet showing the score to be level rather than ahead.
• 2007 Beaten heavily by Australia in the semi-final in St Lucia.
• 2011 Beaten by New Zealand in the quarter-final in Dhaka.
• 2015 Beaten by New Zealand in the semi-final at Auckland, when Grant Elliott hit Dale Steyn for six with one ball remaining.
• 2023 Beaten by Australia in the semi-final in Kolkata.
• 2024 Reached a first men's global final, at Barbados in the T20 World Cup, and lost to India after needing a modest total from the closing overs with wickets in hand.

The word habitually applied to this record is unhelpful, and the arithmetic behind it is thinner than the reputation suggests. Several of those matches were lost off the last ball or the last over. One was lost to a rule that no longer exists and another to an administrative error on a piece of paper. Teams that lose that many close knockout games are, by definition, reaching that many knockout games.

The Cronje case

In April 2000 the Delhi police announced that they had transcripts of telephone conversations between the South African captain, Hansie Cronje, and an Indian bookmaker, in which team information and the fixing of matches were discussed. Cronje denied everything. Within days he telephoned the United Cricket Board in the early hours of the morning to admit that he had not been honest, and he was sacked.

The King Commission, a formal South African commission of inquiry, took evidence that year. Cronje admitted accepting money from bookmakers over a period of years for information and for attempting to influence the course of matches. He testified that he had offered money to Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams to underperform in a one-day international in India; both were subsequently fined and banned for six months. Cronje was banned from any involvement in cricket for life. He died in a plane crash in the Outeniqua mountains in June 2002, at 32.

One further detail belongs in the record. The Centurion Test against England in January 2000, washed out for three days, was resolved by a double forfeiture arranged between Cronje and the England captain Nasser Hussain, which produced a result and was widely praised at the time as an act of sporting generosity. It later emerged that Cronje had been paid by a bookmaker to ensure the match did not end in a draw.

The case did lasting damage in a specific way. Cronje had been an enormously popular captain in a country using its cricket team as a symbol of a new political settlement, and the fall was correspondingly public. It also made clear to every board in the world that captains were not beyond reach, which changed how the sport polices itself.

Donald, Kallis and the strongest side South Africa has had

Set against all of that is a period of about fifteen years in which South Africa were, by most measures, the hardest team in the world to beat away from home.

The fast-bowling line

Allan Donald was the first South African to take 300 Test wickets and finished with 330 in 72 matches. He bowled genuinely fast off a long, rhythmic run and his duel with Michael Atherton at Trent Bridge in 1998 is among the most replayed passages of Test cricket from the decade. Shaun Pollock, son of Peter and nephew of Graeme, bowled a metronomic off-stump line and took 421 Test wickets at an economy rate that made him almost impossible to score off.

Makhaya Ntini became the first black African cricketer to hold a regular place in the South African side and played 101 Tests for 390 wickets, running in wide of the crease and angling the ball across right-handers. Dale Steyn followed and finished as South Africa's leading Test wicket-taker with 439, bowling at high pace with late outswing and a strike rate better than almost anyone in the format's history. Morne Morkel supplied hostile bounce from tall and took more than 300 Test wickets alongside him.

Kagiso Rabada continued the line, reaching 300 Test wickets in fewer matches than any South African before him. In the IPL, where he has played for Delhi, Punjab and Gujarat, our figures give him 151 wickets in 101 matches at an average of 22.31. Steyn's own IPL record, across four franchises, stands at 97 wickets in 94 matches at an economy rate of 6.93.

The batters

Jacques Kallis played 166 Tests and finished with 13,289 runs at an average above 55, with 45 centuries, and took 292 Test wickets bowling fast-medium. No cricketer other than Garfield Sobers has combined batting and bowling records of that magnitude, and Kallis did it for eighteen years without ever generating much noise about it.

Graeme Smith captained South Africa in 109 Tests, more than anyone has captained any country. He led series wins in England in 2008 and 2012 and in Australia in 2008-09, which no South African captain had managed, and he batted at Sydney in 2009 with a broken hand to try to save a Test. In our IPL data he made 739 runs in 29 innings for Rajasthan and Pune Warriors, a footnote to a career that was almost entirely about Test cricket.

Hashim Amla made 311 not out at The Oval in 2012, the first triple century by a South African, in a match that took the side to the top of the Test rankings. His IPL record with Punjab in our figures is short and startling: 577 runs from 16 innings at 44.38 with two hundreds.

AB de Villiers is the most difficult of them to summarise, because he did two opposite things extremely well. He holds the fastest fifty, fastest hundred and fastest 150 in one-day international cricket, the century made from 31 balls against West Indies at the Wanderers in January 2015. He also batted 297 balls for 43 at Delhi in 2015 in an attempt to save a Test. Our IPL records give him 5,162 runs in 170 innings at a strike rate of 151.69 with 251 sixes, almost all of them for Royal Challengers.

Around them: Herschelle Gibbs, Gary Kirsten, Mark Boucher behind the stumps for a record number of Test dismissals, and later Faf du Plessis, who scored 4,773 IPL runs in our data across Chennai and Bengaluru, and Quinton de Kock, with 3,441.

The 438 game

On 12 March 2006 at the Wanderers, Australia made 434 for four in a one-day international, a total nobody had reached before. South Africa chased it down with a ball to spare, Gibbs making 175 and Smith 90. It remains the most-cited single match in South African cricket and the moment at which the ceiling on one-day totals was understood to have moved.

Transformation and the quota argument

Unification in 1991 merged two structures that had been built separately for a century, with facilities, coaching, school cricket and money concentrated almost entirely on one side of the join. Every South African cricket administration since has had to decide how fast to correct that and by what means.

The documented position is as follows. Provincial cricket has operated under selection targets since the late 1990s. At national level, Cricket South Africa introduced a target from 2016 requiring the men's side to field, averaged across a season rather than in every individual match, a specified number of players of colour including a specified number of black African players. Development programmes, school partnerships and academy funding have run alongside the targets throughout.

The arguments are also documented, and both are made in good faith by serious people.

• Those who support the targets point out that the pipeline was deliberately starved for a century, that voluntary correction had produced very slow change through the 1990s, and that without a mechanism the structural advantage simply reproduces itself. They also note that several of the players who came through under the system have had substantial international careers.
• Those who oppose them argue that selection targets place a burden on individual cricketers who are then assumed by spectators to be selected for reasons other than ability, that the intervention operates at the wrong end of the pipeline, and that the resources would do more at school and club level.

The individual cases are the ones people remember. Makhaya Ntini took nearly 400 Test wickets and no reasonable observer thought he was there for any reason but his bowling. Temba Bavuma became the first black African to score a Test century, at Newlands against England in January 2016, and later captained the side, having spent years fielding a public argument about his place that was rarely conducted with much care for the fact that he was a person.

In 2021 Cricket South Africa ran the Social Justice and Nation-Building hearings, a public inquiry into discrimination in the game since unification. Former players gave evidence about their treatment. The report that followed was contested in places, but the hearings themselves put on the record a set of accounts that had previously circulated only informally, and that is the most useful thing about them.

Where the record stands

South Africa's men's team has won two global titles: the ICC KnockOut in 1998 and the World Test Championship final at Lord's in June 2025, where they beat Australia in the fourth innings with Aiden Markram making a century. Between those two dates lie twenty-seven years, an enormous quantity of very good Test cricket, and a run of knockout defeats that became a national preoccupation.

The domestic game has been restructured repeatedly, from the old provincial Currie Cup through a franchise system and back toward a provincial one. The SA20, launched in 2023 and financed largely by owners of IPL franchises, gave South African cricket a viable domestic Twenty20 economy for the first time, at the cost of tying its calendar to the interests of a league it does not control. South African cricketers remain in demand everywhere the game is played professionally, in the IPL, the Big Bash and the wider circuit, and the national board negotiates for their availability from a weaker position than the English or Australian boards do.

What makes South Africa's story unlike any other Test nation's is that its central event is an absence. Australia and England have unbroken records running back to the nineteenth century. South Africa has a gap of twenty-one years in the middle of its own, taken out at the exact moment the team was at its strongest, for reasons that had nothing to do with cricket and everything to do with a government's insistence on applying its racial laws to a touring side. Nothing that has happened since can be discussed without reference to it. Zimbabwe, the other southern African Test nation, has its own version of the same problem, arrived at by a different route.

The rest of the game's national stories, including the sides South Africa beat and the ones that beat them, are collected in our cricket history index, and the tournament that supplied so many of the defeats above is covered in our guide to the Cricket World Cup and how the format changed.