The Howard Milton Award For Cricket Scholarship

THE HOWARD MILTON AWARD FOR CRICKET SCHOLARSHIP

2026 Winner: Professor André Odendaal 

The Howard Milton Award for Cricket Scholarship 2026 has been awarded to Professor André Odendaal in recognition of five decades of ground-breaking scholarship that has reshaped our understanding of cricket’s social, political, and racial history.

Professor Odendaal holds a unique position in cricket history as a scholar, activist, academic, and former first-class cricketer. After his early career playing for Stellenbosch and Cambridge Universities, in the 1980s he broke with apartheid-era structures to play for non-racial clubs affiliated with the South African Cricket Board. This experience inspired his commitment to uncovering stories long excluded from mainstream colonial narratives.

While Professor Odendaal's political histories established him as a premier authority on South African liberation history, his cricket scholarship is equally impressive. His early books, Cricket in Isolation (1977) and The Story of an African Game (2003), dismantled long-held myths to reveal a rich 150-year legacy of Black, Coloured, and Indian cricket in South Africa.

This research culminated in his lead role in the multi-volume History of South African Cricket Retold. Cricket & Conquest (1795–1914) with Christopher Merrett, Jonty Winch, and Krish Reddy, revised early colonial histories by detailing how marginalised communities shaped the game. Divided Country (1914–1960) with Krish Reddy and Christopher Merrett, showed how political division spawned seven competing ‘national’ cricket boards. Three more volumes, including a comprehensive statistical database, are nearing completion.

Professor Odendaal's work, through a particular focus on those excluded and whitewashed from the historical record on the grounds of race and gender, not only transforms our understanding of South Africa’s cricket journey, but provides a pathway as South Africa struggles to reinvent and transform itself. 

His books Pitch Battles (co-authored with Peter Hain, 2020) and Swallows and Hawke (co-authored with Richard Parry, 2022), set an unrivalled standard for sports history by exploring cricket’s ties to empire, diplomacy, and global politics.

Beyond research, as former Chief Executive of the Western Province Cricket Association and Director of the Robben Island Museum, Professor Odendaal has put principles into action, working to democratise sports administration and preserve national memory, including editing the multi-volume African Lives series

For his intellectual courage and his lifelong dedication to giving forgotten cricketers their rightful place in history, the BSSH and The Cricket Society are proud and delighted to present the 2026 Howard Milton Award to Professor André Odendaal.

The award has been announced at the BSSH Annual Conference at the University of Edinburgh (27-28 August 2026). The award will be presented to Professor Odendaal in person at a special Cricket Society event at the Civil Service Club on 2 September 2026.

The Howard Milton Award, a collaboration between The Cricket Society and the British Society of Sports History, is awarded annually to a person or persons who have made an outstanding and/or unsung contribution to cricket scholarship. The award seeks to recognise good cricket writing and research whether of an ‘academic’ or ‘popular’ nature. Winners are decided on the recommendations of a panel drawn from officers of both organisations.

It is named after Howard Milton, the eminent cricket historian and statistician and Honorary Librarian at The Cricket Society for over 40 years. Previous winners include Neil Robinson, the Association of Cricket Statisticians & Historians, the Sussex Cricket Museum, John Goulstone, and Ramachandra Guha.