Читать книгу Cricket: A Modern Anthology - Jonathan Agnew, Jonathan Agnew - Страница 22

While I didn’t ever play against D’Oliveira, he was, by my time in the game, the second XI coach at Worcestershire. I would encounter him on several occasions over the years and I remember him holding forth in the changing rooms at New Road, where he was still a huge figure. How was it that this unassuming man could have become such a massive, inadvertent political figure without doing anything other than be selected to represent his adopted country at sport? I think he was just the right person at the right time, who happened to come along and, by being there, helped see the back of the hideous regime in South Africa. His role as a significant catalyst in the anti-apartheid movement is now well documented. The television coverage of the Basil D’Oliveira affair and the 1971 Springbok tour to Australia that encountered so much anti-apartheid hostility meant that the horrors of the system and the vehement protests were brought into people’s daily lives. The rest, as they say, is history.