I was at
the St David’s Challenge Cup schools football tournament a few weeks ago and
reflected on the all-round excellence of the event while, at the same time,
bemoaning the fact that it is one of only a handful of tournaments at which
football at this level (there were under-15 and under-19 teams there) gets its
place in the sun).
It is,
sadly, an elitist and exclusionary event. The entire ethos is based on the traditional
way of organising sports at a certain type of school. I’m talking about schools
that believe in mass participation, in encouraging their learners to play many
different sports, and in playing the same set of traditional opponents, year
after year.
So, the
schools at the St David’s tournament are the same ones, with a very few exceptions, that have been there every year since it started. Norkem Park High School, the
runners-up in the under-19 section this year, are outliers – they aren’t a boys-only
or a private school like the others – but they have been playing there all
along.
Football
at the vast majority of schools in the land is not run this way.
There is
very little organised sport in most of the schools in this country. There are
no quality fields or facilities at those schools, and no resources to provide
them. The stark inequalities that exist between the haves and have-nots in our
schooling system persist, 25 years into our new democracy, with its promises of changing
that.
There are
other priorities for what money is available for education and, somehow, sport is
not regarded by the authorities as being an important part of the educational
programme. That much was made clear by the response to the Covid-19 epidemic
when a blanket ban was placed on sport at schools and no attempt was made to
reinstate it when the schools were gradually re-opened later on.
That’s the
context in which the St David’s tournament takes place.
There are those, of course,
who are dedicated to uplifting the children at those under-resourced schools
through the medium of sport, specifically football. I was
reminded of that the week before St David’s when I went to the DanUP Soccer
Clinic at the Discovery Park center at the Wanderers. It involved some 50 nine
to12 year-old boys, and a few girls, and it was laid on by yoghurt manufacturer,
Danone. They were township kids, bussed in, and the idea was to give them a
morning to remember, to give them some life-skills tips and some skills
training from the Discovery Park coaches.
Danone, in
the days before Covid, sponsored the Danone Nations Cup. It was an
international under-12 tournament organised by the South African Schools
Football Association (Sasfa). Sasfa had all sorts of problems, but at least it
brought organised soccer to the poorest schools and to the remotest corners of
the land. The activities were limited and the numbers involved in each school
are small, but if it weren’t for Sasfa’s interventions there would be no
sporting activity at all in many of those places.
Things
went on hold in 2020 because of Covid-19 and the future is unclear, but before
the lockdown Sasfa ran sponsored tournaments in five age groups. There’s pretty
substantial prize money on offer, but no cash changes hands. Instead, the
winning schools draw up a wish list of long term improvements that can be made
at their schools and the sponsor pays for them.
The Danone
Nations Cup was different in that the first prize there is participation in a
World Finals tournament, with the winning school being sent to some overseas
venue to compete against 90 other national champions. What made the competition
special is that the original idea was that the participating nations shouldn’t
send their elite youth champions to the World Finals but that the winners
should emerge from some sort of “football for good” project in their countries.
Not
everyone stuck to that, it seemed, but the Brazilian team, for example, used to
come from a programme run in the favelos of Rio de Janeiro and the England
representatives were not the under-12 academy team of one of the Premier League
clubs but rather the winners of an inner city upliftment- through-sport project.
South
Africa never sent its national champion team – there is no competition to
determine who that would be anyway – instead, the Sasfa process has sent
youngsters from impoverished schools in townships, and in the deepest of rural
settings, to play on a world stage. It’s a shining light in an otherwise bleak
sporting landscape.
Those
tournaments were last played in 2019. I spoke to Emmanuel Marchant, managing director
for Danone Southern Africa at the DanUp clinic and he told me that, because the
Covid lockdown and its effect on the economy had affected them like every else,
they have had to put the Nations Cup on hold for now. They have every intention
though, as does Groupe Danone – their international mother company – of reinstating
it.
“It’s in
the company’s DNA,” he told me, “to make a difference wherever we operate. Education
is the area we have chosen, through the medium of football, and we intend carrying
on with it.”
That
morning’s clinic, he said, was a small step back on that road.
But it’s not just football. On display at the clinic that
Saturday was a tiny school desk, made entirely out of recycled Danone plastic yoghurt
tubs, and a concrete block, amazingly also made out of used yoghurt containers.
They will be used to build and furnish schools in South African townships.
“We have clever people behind that project,” Marchant said, “but
more importantly, they are passionate about finding solutions to the problems
facing the children. That’s the Danone way.”
There was enough evidence of that among the Danone people on
duty at Discovery Park that morning. My prayer is that they will get the chance
sooner rather than later to put all of that passion and innovation into a
relaunched Danone Nations Cup competition.
The children need it back, badly.
