On Cricket:Vincent Van Der Bijl is often referred to as the "best bowler never to have played Test cricket". The South African played his entire career during the apartheid ban, when the country was excluded from the international game for nearly two decades.

He is best known outside of South Africa for the one season he spent playing for Middlesex in 1980, the year they won the English County Championship. Van der Bijl's fast medium took 85 wickets at a parsimonious average of 14 runs per wicket.

His ability to tie batsmen down prompted legendary BBC commentator John Arlott to describe the balding, bespectacled player as: "Looking like Lord Longford (the famous human rights campaigner), but not nearly as forgiving."

Watching the 6ft 7ins Van Der Bijl bowl that year was an education - think a more liquid Glenn McGrath. From his high delivery point he moved the ball both ways in the air and off the seam. Even the best players hate playing a bouncing ball consistently pitching on and around off stump.

I caught up with him at Stormont a few weeks ago, as he was travelling with the South African team as their tour manager. The 59-year-old now spends his days as director of high performance with the South African Cricket Board.

His views on Irish cricket come with a caveat. He does not want to come across as offering a prescriptive solution to the challenges ahead. He knows there are tough decisions to be made if Ireland is to fulfil their potential in cricketing terms.

He sees parallels with the growth of the game in his home country in the late 1960s and 70s. He and his team-mates also had to juggle playing cricket with earning a living, in his case as a teacher, and then later as a businessman. And because of the ban, the domestic game suffered a talent drain to county cricket.

"I didn't want to become a professional cricketer, I already had a profession," he says. Having a career away from the game is the best way of improving people as cricketers he says. "You bring everything you learn in your job to the field of play: disciplines such as negotiation, team work, the ability to see problems as challenges all make for better players of games."

Professionalism is not a panacea to all ills he warns. "To be a sportsman is to live an unhappy life," says Van der Bijl, citing the philosophy of the late American tennis star, Arthur Ashe. "Ashe would often ask what is this drive within top sportsmen that makes us never satisfied. It means we never feel we have done enough, we are never satisfied - which is the wrong way to live your life."

The exodus of players to county cricket experienced by Ireland is also something with which he can empathise. "Ireland will always lose players to county cricket, it is inevitable, even if they have a series of good summers."

The absence of Test recognition meant the domestic state game in South Africa became extremely competitive, an end in itself.

The "best player" tag is one he hates. There were many others who would be above him in the list he says modestly. "My success with Middlesex was a relief, rather than a feeling of excitement," he says. "It told me that I was a good player".

Apart from Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock and Mike Proctor, "who were obviously geniuses", the lack of international competition meant there was no barometer against which their ability could be properly measured. "When we played throughout the ban at home we didn't know how good we were."

The answer to that one is easy. Very good.

The popular Irish cricket photographer Billy McLeod has died suddenly in hospital as a result of a blood clot. Billy worked primarily for the Derry Journal, but his work also featured amongst others in the Belfast Telegraph, Strabane Chronicle, and Northern Constitution.

NW chairman Joe Doherty paid tribute to Billy saying: "The sudden death of Billy McLeod is a devastating loss for North West cricket . . . . His was a familiar face at every cricket ground in the region and he was a great friend to us all."