The great changing room of colour and classThe race to transform : sport in post-apartheid South Africa, Ashwin Desai (Ed.) : book review

Reflecting on the issue of winning and losing in a chapter on sport in his 2005 work entitled, The angry island : Hunting the English, the acerbic Scottish writer, A.A. Gill, makes two acute observations, both of which have some bearing on the book under review. The first of these is that, in sport, the lesson to be learnt from the English is that it is comforting to be beaten, for the measure of…