Saturday night saw a group of us on Wellawatta beach, sampling the culinary delights offered at the appropriately named Beach Wadiya. It might be an unassuming little shack on the outside, but once you wander in, the thick ledger that doubles up as an autograph book reveals itself to be a mini Cricketers' Who's Who. A few minutes later, Clive Lloyd and the South African umpire Dave Orchard join our table, causing the bearers to twitter with excitement. One of them asks me quietly - while serving the prawns and crab, which live up to their reputation - who the "dark gentleman" is. When I tell him, he asks me discreetly if the said gentleman is famous. "Yes, you could say that," I say. After all, he only captained the greatest cricket team ever to walk the Earth.

After some more wine, dessert and a walk on the sands, conversation veers around to the new experiments with technology for umpiring decisions. Both Lloyd and Orchard agree that ICC might have been better off going the whole hog, using technology like Hawk-eye and the snickometer to ensure that errors were kept to a minimum. Orchard goes so far as to say, "It hasn't really helped. You're taking up more time for decisions, without them being any more conclusive than before." The snickometer is regarded as almost foolproof, though we argue about whether Hawk-eye can accurately chart the course of a ball that swings late.

Orchard then tells me about his international career that never was. "I was in the list of probables for the tours of England in 1970 and Australia in 1971, but the board guys told us not to bother going down for the camp in Cape Town. They said it might be another eight or ten years before we played Test cricket again." With a smile, he adds, "We didn't know then that it would be 22."

There's more than a hint of regret but he says, "I suppose it was the times we lived in. There's no point dwelling on it too much." He was part of a magnificent Natal side that included Barry Richards ("The best batsman I've ever watched") and Vintcent van der Bijl ("Not quite as quick as Joel Garner, but every bit as effective"), but all he'll tell you about his own game is that he could "bat and bowl a bit".

When you nudge him a little more about the "other" Richards, he comes up with a beautiful anecdote. "Back in those days, we used to have these Durban v Pietermaritzburg matches. Barry had got to 20 in one of those when we asked him if he was game enough to play the rest of his innings with the edge of his bat. He agreed and got from 20 to 125 in an hour ... played every shot in the book with the edge, including the cover-drive."

Earlier in the day, Sir Vivian Richards had talked to me about how much he would have relished playing South Africa when their golden generation was at its peak. When told of that, Orchard smiles and says, "That would have been some series. We had our share of useful players."

When we talk about the minnows of world cricket, Eddie Barlow's name crops up, because he coached Bangladesh a few years ago. "He's paralysed after his stroke," Orchard says. "There was a dinner for him a few months ago, and almost all his old team-mates were there. It took him about half-an-hour to walk from his wheelchair to his table, helped by his old mate, Hylton Ackerman. When he got to his seat, Eddie grinned and said, 'Just took me a long time to measure my run-up, boys.' I can tell you there wasn't a dry eye in the house."

An hour with Orchard is enough to convince even the most hardened cynic that it wasn't only black people that suffered under the pernicious apartheid regime dreamt up by Daniel Malan and carried forward so ruthlessly by the likes of Hendrik Verwoerd, Balthazar Vorster and PW Botha. In a more enlightened age, Barry Richards would have shared the stage with Viv as the greatest batsman of his generation. As it is, he has to be content with a small corner of the record book that tells you of four Tests, 508 runs ... and the promise of what might have been.

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden.com.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd