Not cricket | 5 January 2017

Sport is a serious matter. If you have any doubts on that score, shed them now, because this is to be a South African year. The South African cricket team comes to England in the summer to play four Test matches, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 games, and as they do so they will ask a million questions — not only about cover drives and reverse swing, but also about the way to make a society, about the way to redeem a society, about idealism versus practicality, about short-term advantage versus long-term goals and about the nature of justice.

There is an argument doing the rounds. It goes like this: South Africa should be banned from participation in international sport because of the government-level discrimination against white athletes. And while this is an obvious piece of mischief-making, it raises legitimate questions about the nature of sport. What is it for? And what’s it got to do with national and international politics?

These questions go back to the quota system, under which the South African government insists that at each level of representative sport there must be a certain number of non-white players, including a smaller number of ‘African black’ athletes.