Clive Rice, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 66, never played a test match but he captained a provincial side that was at least the equal of any test side in the world, and was one of the most famous cricketers in the world. The fact that the top newspapers in the UK responded to news of his death with lengthy obituaries says it all.He was widely acknowledged as one of the best all-rounders in the game.The only reason he wasn't included in the list of the top test all-rounders of his era - alongside Richard Hadlee, Kapil Dev, Imran Khan and Ian Botham - was that he never played test cricket.He won three out of four single-wicket world all-rounder competitions against Botham, Imran, Hadlee and Kapil. Only Imran beat him.story_article_left1Rice was picked for the 1971-72 Springbok tour of Australia which was cancelled because of the international sports boycott. It was regarded as the strongest Springbok side ever selected until then.Playing county cricket in England was compensation of a kind. It allowed him to compete with the best in the world, most of whom played county cricket in those days, and he did so with a vengeance. He was chosen for Nottinghamshire and scored 246 for them against Sussex in 1976, his highest score in county cricket.He was made captain in 1978, a position that had been held by the best all-rounder of all time, Gary Sobers.He was stripped of the captaincy when he joined Kerry Packer's breakaway World Series, but was reinstated the following year.He led what had been a relatively underperforming outfit to the county championship in 1981 and 1987, his final season.Members who had opposed his reinstatement cheered him all the way to the wicket.Rice was born in Johannesburg on July 23 1949. He attended St John's College and the University of Natal.He played his first game for Transvaal in 1971 at Newlands, in front of a crowd that soon grew to loathe him.His second game was in Port Elizabeth against Eastern Province, which boasted two of the most aggressive bowlers of the day: Peter Pollock and future England captain Tony Greig.It was a game Transvaal had to win to make the Currie Cup final. Eastern Province batted first and got 350. Next day Transvaal captain Ali Bacher and Lee Irvine got 200 between them and then there was a collapse. Rice was sent in at 240 for 6. Eastern Province took the second new ball with Greig at one end and Pollock at the other. They knew if they got him out it would be all over because he was the only batsman Transvaal had left.full_story_image_hleft1It was overcast and the wicket had been prepared to give the Eastern Province quickies every assistance. Conditions were ideal for aggressive bowling and Pollock and Greig showed no mercy. They bounced him with unrelenting ferocity. The ball screamed past Rice's unprotected head - there were no helmets then - like a missile.Rice, barely 21 at the time, kept his head, went past his half-century, and helped Transvaal to victory.Bacher remembered it as one of the most impressive displays of big-match temperament he had ever seen.Several years later Rice was recruited to join the world's best in Australian tycoon Kerry Packer's revolutionary World Series Cricket, and excelled.He was paid handsomely and didn't see why he should play for nothing again.On the eve of a Currie Cup final he contacted Bacher from Sydney, and demanded to be paid for playing.This was still very much the amateur era in South Africa and Bacher, annoyed by his chutzpah and given that Rice had played little part in getting Transvaal to the final, angrily refused. How could he pay Rice and not the others?Typically, Rice refused to budge. And, typically, he got his way. A sponsor stumped up R15000 (a sizeable amount at the time) and he played.Next, Rice demanded appearance fees and salaries for his fellow players, too. He was denounced as a mercenary, but again he stuck to his guns. This started the process that led to professionalism in South African cricket.Under his captaincy Transvaal in the 1980s, known as the "mean machine", were invincible. This was partly because of his ruthless competitiveness - he told his players what they were going to do and, if they didn't, they were out - and partly because they were rich enough to lure the country's stars.full_story_image_vleft2Crowds in other provinces hated them for their success, and Rice above all.Nowhere more so than in the Cape. Their rivalry with Western Province was more intense than that between most test-playing nations and the Newlands crowd focused their venom on Rice.He loved it and baited them for all he was worth. The atmosphere at Newlands has never been more electric.Rice was good value all round. Journalists loved him because he was so outspoken. One reporter said he could get a front-page lead out of Rice in under three minutes.He'd phone him up and ask if he'd heard what some Western Province player, usually the fiery fast bowler Garth le Roux (the only local cricketer with a moustache to match Rice's) was saying about Transvaal.story_article_right2Then he'd sit back and enjoy the fireworks.In spite of his combustibility, and provided you weren't bowling or batting against him or defending the quota system - which he condemned as apartheid in reverse - Rice was an exceptionally polite and friendly man with no pretensions.When the selectors defended on the grounds of his age their unpopular decision to leave him out of the 1992 World Cup team after he'd led the first post-isolation tour to India the year before, Rice hammed it up for the Sunday Times, which carried a front-page picture of him looking suitably decrepit in a wheelchair.Rice opened the first karaoke bar in South Africa, at a Taverns of the World fair at Bruma Lake in Johannesburg, after witnessing it during a tour in Thailand.He also loved fast cars which, after his cricket career, he raced with typical, never-give-an-inch competitiveness.He was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1998 and although the tumour was removed, he died of septicaemia as a result of a weakened immune system.He is survived by his wife, Susan, and two children.1949-2015..