Reserve fast bowler Garnett Kruger's inclusion in the touring squad is remarkable for two reasons: first, he is black. And, second, nobody has made any issue of his selection.

FORMER prison warder, a guitar-playing songwriter, an Eastern Cape farmer's boy who has been fined for smoking marijuana in Antigua and the man who did most to officially end race quotas in domestic cricket - these four head the list of new faces in Graeme Smith's squad of South African cricketers who landed in Perth yesterday.

But Charl Langeveldt, A.B. de Villiers, Justin Kemp and Ashwell Prince aren't the only unfamiliar names in the 14-man group attempting to become the first team to succeed in Australia since South Africa's international sporting isolation ended in 1991.

Fast bowler Garnett Kruger is travelling as a reserve to Shaun Pollock, Makhaya Ntini, Andre Nel and Langeveldt, but his inclusion is remarkable for two things: first, he is black. And second, nobody has made any issue of his selection. For the first time since the last allwhite team was selected in November 1998, even the greatest cynic cannot cast an aspersion on the racial motives behind any selection. This is a squad without bias - absolutely and utterly.

South Africa's last tour to these shores was lowlighted by the unedifying, lastminute inclusion of coloured batsman Justin Ontong in place of the white Jacques Rudolph just an hour before the start of the final Test in Sydney.

United Cricket Board President Percy Sonn (now ICC vice-president and international president-elect) forced the selectors to make the change on the morning of the match in line, he said, with the board's racial transformation policy.

But Kruger demolished any speculation of a window-dressing selection with a spectacular haul of 37 wickets in the first five matches of the now streamlined, first-class competition in which last season's 11 provinces have been shoe-horned into six professional franchises.

Tall and rangy with bounce rather than pace as his best weapon, the Port Elizabeth-born seamer has been dogged with hip and hamstring injuries for over three years after being selected as 12th man for the national squad against West Indies in 2003.

He may not pose a McGrath-like threat, but for his countrymen it is comfort enough that he is the next best. And pretty good, too. As well as Kruger has done, however, it is the story of Langeveldt's journey to the top that inspires most.

Spotted as an amateur, weekend club trundler while working full-time as a prison warder in the wine-farming town of Paarl, he was given a break by former World Series batsman Hylton Ackerman, then Boland coach.

But Prince knew he was good enough and he used the snide, old-school comments about "window-dressing" from bitter whites as fuel to drive his ambition rather than curtail it. He was consequently labelled (by whites) as sulky and a troublemaker. He speaks his mind, but that assessment is far from the truth.

And he has made a profound difference to the course of South African cricket history. At a huge conference of all stakeholders - from administrators to players, sponsors and even media - Prince spoke passionately about the curse and stigma of quotas on promising black players and pleaded for their abolition.

The UCB board announced the official abolition of quotas - to the government's disgust - the following day. The fact that they remain, in reality, as firmly entrenched as they ever were does not matter to Prince and the next generation of black players. The wooden baton of stigma, which was used to beat them has gone. All first-class teams in South Africa must field a minimum of four black players and that "rule" is never broken, but there are enough successes these days for administrators to justify the artificiality of the system. Besides, government demands it.

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