It was a selection trial at Newlands in Cape Town on 3 April,1971, between Transvaal and the Rest of South Africa, arguably the best 22 cricketers in the country on the same ground at Newlands at the same time. Transvaal won the toss and elected to bat. One ball was bowled and then they all walked off Barry Richards and Brian Bath walked out to open at Newlands. Mike Procter ran in and bowled the first delivery. Richards pushed it for a single and later admitted with characteristic humour that he did so because he was being paid by the run. And then every single player on that field turned around and walked off in silence. The whole thing lasted a few minutes. The statement handed to the press on the way off was short and plain, that merit and merit alone should be the only criterion for selecting a cricket team. They were protesting the apartheid government's in South Africa refusal to allow non-white players to tour Australia and they were doing it publicly at a time when dissent against the government carried very real consequences. Players came back and finished the match. But those few minutes of silence on a cricket ground at Newlands in Cape Town on this day in 1971, were among the most serious things any group of South African sportsmen ever did. The government said no and players from South Africa decided that was not end of conversation The context matters here because without it the walk off looks like a spontaneous gesture and it was anything but. The South African Cricket Association had gone to the apartheid government specifically requesting permission to include non-white players in the upcoming tour of Australia. This was itself an extraordinary thing to have to do, to ask your own government whether the people you select to represent your country are acceptable to them. South Africa Prime Minister John Vorster's cabinet said no. Merit-based multi-racial selection was against the law and that was supposed to be the end of it. What the government apparently did not anticipate was that the South Africa players had a view of their own on this. Mike Procter and Denis Lindsay and the Pollock brothers, Graeme and Peter , had been talking and the plan was in place before a single ball was bowled. Even Ali Bacher who was captain of South Africa at the time and was not playing in the match made clear from the sidelines that he fully supported what was about to happen. This was not a moment of impulsive anger. It was a considered and coordinated act by men who understood exactly what they were doing and what it could cost them. Charles Fortune, the respected sports commentator had suggested the previous evening that they return and finish the match rather than abandon it so as not to disappoint the thousands of spectators who had paid to be there. That suggestion was taken on board and it was the right call, the walk off made its point without punishing the crowd for the government's failures. What that generation of cricketers gave up is something that deserves to be said plainly The tour to Australia never happened. South Africa did not play international cricket again until 1991, a twenty year exile that ended the Test careers of some of the most gifted players of South Africa the game has ever produced. Graeme Pollock of South Africa averaged 60.97 in Test cricket across 23 matches and then never played at that level again. Mike Procter played seven Tests for South Africa. Barry Richards played four for South Africa. These were men at the absolute peak of their ability who were removed from the international game in their prime because their government's racial policies made continued participation impossible. And yet the most striking thing about how some of them have spoken about it in the years since is the absence of bitterness. Procter went on record and said what is a Test career compared to the suffering of forty million people and that if by missing out on one they played a part in changing an unjust system then that was fine by him. There is a quality to a statement like that which does not come easily. It requires a person to have looked honestly at what they value and concluded that something else matters more. There is also a quietly poignant footnote to that Newlands match, it was South Africa's Procter's first game since scoring centuries in six consecutive first class innings, a feat only CB Fry and Don Bradman had previously achieved. Had he scored another that day he would have stood alone in cricket history. He was out for 22 and by his own admission had a few other things on his mind. Also READ: Anil Gurav passes away at 61: The Viv Richards of Mumbai who was Achrekar's first star before Sachin Tendulkar What makes Newlands different from every other protest of that era is where the courage came from The 1970 Stop the Tour campaign in England led by Peter Hain gets more attention in most histories of this period and it was genuinely significant work. But the Newlands walk off has a quality that sets it apart and that quality is this, the rebellion came from inside. These were white cricketers from South Africa who were not personally subject to the laws they were protesting. The apartheid system worked in their favour. They were the ones being selected, the ones with opportunities, the ones whose careers existed precisely because the system excluded others. And they walked off anyway. Six weeks after Newlands the ANC,which at the time was a banned organisation operating in exile, prepared a paper for the United Nations that used language almost identical to the players' press statement. That document was dated 25 May 1971. Whether there was any direct connection or whether two groups simply arrived at the same moral position at the same moment is unclear but the parallel is striking. Fifty five years on the Newlands walk off deserves more space in the history of sporting protest than it currently occupies not because it changed everything immediately but because it demonstrated something that is still rare, that conscience does not always wait for external pressure to arrive. Sometimes it walks in off the pavilion steps pulls on its gloves and decides that one ball is enough.