100-point wins don't do anyone any good

There is no scoreboard, I’m told, at the field where an under-14 rugby team notched up a 104-0 win at the weekend, so at least we were spared the celebratory photo with the score in the background, but there was still a fair amount of gloating by the people associated with the winning school.

I’m not naming names. The losers have been humiliated enough, and it’s really not about particular schools, there’s, surely, a principle here.

You’ll remember that last year a team that won 221-0 posed in front of those numbers and the photo was posted on the school’s Twitter and Facebook sites. I commented at the time that it was as sickening as those pictures that you see of so-called hunters posing over the carcasses of slain lions or elephants. I have the same nausea again today, and it’s an appropriate comparison, because rugby players who are willing to turn out for the lower teams in the junior age groups are rapidly becoming an endangered species and we should be doing all we can to conserve them, just like we should be looking after those magnificent wild animals.

There were some right-minded people who commented on Saturday’s posting and they said what should be obvious: allowing a rugby game between 13 year-olds go to over 100 points is an abomination. It does no-one any good, not the winners nor the losers, and worse, it encourages the mothers of those humiliated (and probably physically battered) players to withdraw them from the game.

Now, if you think badly coached and unskilled rugby players aren’t also important you need to take a breath and think about it. In the first instance, the quality of any elite side depends on the numbers below, reduce the base of the pyramid and the apex will be lower. Those involved in sport as part of the educational process have a duty to make their teams as good as they can be, but they also have a responsibility to the greater game. It’s also a matter of self-interest. What are they going to do when there is no-one left to play against?

And their duty to their players includes developing their character – there’s no profit in breeding braggarts and bullies, and scoring more than a point a minute is purely that: it’s bragging and it’s bullying.

Some in the comments section question the value of helping out those strugglers – let them learn the lessons of standing up against a superior force and taking their punishment like men, they say.

It really shouldn’t be necessary to point out that that’s the language of the fascist, of the colonial master and the child-beating parent. Is it really what a fine educational institution wants to be saying? And those who know who I’m talking about will agree that all four schools – the beaters and the beaten – in the two stories I tell, are all among the very best schools in the land.

No. Tell your testosterone-charged young coaches to reign it in, instruct referees to protect the weaker teams and re-introduce the rule, that used to exist, of stopping the game when the score reaches 50-0.

It’s the right thing to do.

The ugly side of sports fields

I started a bit of a twitter storm by tweeting, inspired by spending the last few days at the Craven Week at Paarl Boys' High, a list of what I thought were the prettiest school grounds in the country.

Not everyone agreed with me, although I suspect there was some jingoism going on with old boys and parents struggling to see past the beauty of the fields they played on, or where they watch their children play these days.

It reminded me that some time ago I wrote a piece about the ugly grounds I've been forced to watch sport at. Here's an extract from it

I spent a week in December 2009 at the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola cricket week in Benoni.

The Coke Week, as it is known, represents the pinnacle of achievement for schoolboy players and it is the envy of the other cricket-playing nations. None of them have the organisational capacity, and the dedication on the part of players and administrators to pull off a tournament of such size and standard, particularly not just before Christmas.

As I sat in the shade at the Willowmoore Park B ground drowsily watching the action I got to thinking of the venues that have hosted the event over the years. The pleasantness of the setting led me to remembering the ugliest cricket grounds I’ve ever watched games at – and I’ve been to a few in the course of my job.

There are some other contenders, but the honour of the ugliest of all goes to the Gelvandale Cricket Club in Port Elizabeth. I was there at the 2008 Coke Week when the Gauteng under-19 side played against KwaZulu-Natal.

Gelvandale is a “township” club, nothing wrong with that. And it occupies an illustrious spot in cricket history in this country. Many cricketing greats from the apartheid days played there, and honour and glory goes to those who are keeping the game alive there. But I wondered, why the boys from KES and St John’s, DHS and Kearsney have to spend one fifth of what was the highlight week of their cricketing lives so far, there?

To be kind, the ground slopes at about 10 degrees, north to south, and has doesn’t have much of what most people would call grass. It is flanked on one side by an electricity distribution station and the southern boundary is the fence of the local cemetery – one wag among the spectators wondered out loud which was worse, Eskom or the graveyard - they both had the stench of death about them.

Then there was the real stench, wafting in from a local sewage works and driving everyone into their cars with the windows up, in the heat and humidity.

There have been some other awful settings, often in places where you expect better. I remember the week in Stellenbosch where, instead of playing in a lovely setting among the vines, the players were expected to be inspired on a ground belonging to one of the distillers, surrounded by railway carriages and empty packing crates, all underlain by that smell of stale booze that you get in a pub at opening time (I’m told).

And a few years ago in Potchefstroom there were games at the local mental hospital. The wicket was great but some of the spectators were disconcerting, to say the least.

A few years ago when the week was in Johannesburg matches were played on beautiful fields at St David’s, at the Wanderers club and at St John’s College. In keeping with tournament tradition, however, the boys also travelled to Kagiso and Alex and Soweto where, if the idea was to show them the ugliness of the other side, it certainly worked.

Willowmoore Park, despite its industrial revolution era concrete light pylons, doesn’t fall into the category of ugly cricket grounds. Sure, the main stadium is a bit barren and it’s Northern end abuts on the sleazier side of Benoni’s CBD, but go down to the B, C and D fields and you are transported into a charming rural setting: fields ringed by blue gums, and bordered by a vlei lined with the willow trees that the ground gets its name from.

Conventional wisdom about the Khaya Majola Week (and its rugby counterpart, the Craven Week) is that the best ones are held in the smaller towns. The 2009 week in Benoni was one of those, and all within sight of the ugly big city.

The 2018 Craven Week in Paarl is turning out to be one of those too, and the Brug Street ground at Paarl Boys' High has as spectacular a view as you could hope for.

The Craven Week isn't supposed to be a knockout competition

A friend and colleague has in his collection all but four of the 55 Craven Week programme booklets that have been produced and he let me have a look at the one from 1987, the last time the week was here in Paarl.

I wasn’t at that week, my first one was the next year, as manager of the Transvaal XV, but it made interesting reading, no fewer than 12 future Springboks played in the week, and the late Hansie Cronje was the captain of the Free State team.

Transvaal and Natal played in the main game, which ended in a 22-all draw, with James Small and Brendan Venter in that Transvaal team. The coach of the Transvaal team was Niels Bornman, then at Monument, and the manager was Ian Adam. The Transvaal XV was coached by Max Arnold with Buks de Jager as manager. All four would become good friends of mine in the years to come.

Adam and De Jager both became headmasters, and both were chairman of the Transvaal Schools Association later on. Bornman and Arnold, both rugby men to their very souls have, sadly, both passed away.

I read Dr Danie Craven’s message in the programme and there it is – in the 24th year of the week’s existence – he still insists that there should be no winner, and that attractive running rugby, keeping the ball alive, should be rewarded.

As I put the booklet down, Free State and The Blue Bulls took the field at Paarl Boys’ High for their opening games, with everyone knowing that this was in effect a quarterfinal clash and the winners, irrespective of the type of rugby they played, would advance to the “semis” on Thursday and the winner there would be in Saturday’s “final”.

Free State won, and they played great rugby – Doc Craven would have approved – and they will meet the Sharks, who also played nice rugby, on Thursday.

So, no complaints there from me, except that there’s an air of inevitability about it all, as if it’s been stage-managed, with the aim of putting the hosts in the main game.

I said so in a piece I wrote for the SA Rugbymag website.

http://www.sarugbymag.co.za/craven-week-fixtures-favour-hosts/

It generated a few comments and one reader pointed out that I’m from Joburg, and associated with a Joburg school, and insinuated that I was having a biased go at WP.

Maybe I wasn’t clear, but I was really having a go at the system that manipulates the passage of the favoured team. Of course the same thing happened in Joburg last year. The Golden Lions were given Border on day one and they won a one-sided game 44-8. They then drew with Western Province on day 2 and were given the main game.

The same thing is happening in Paarl this year: WP beat the Pumas 74-10 on day, and they meet the Lions on Wednesday. The plan is clearly that they should win that one and draw a capacity crowd for the final on Saturday.

Province have a great side with some brilliant players and they would be worthy of a place in the final game. But that’s not really the point, is it?

The concept that the big guns get priority and the rest are making up the numbers never sits well with me. It’s not sporting, and it’s certainly not educational. Surely the Craven Week belongs to everyone and the lesser teams aren’t just here to fill out the programme and pass the time until the big games are played in the late afternoon?

Here’s an idea. It’s not original – they do it at the Khaya Majola cricket week each year. How about, on day one, matching all the top tier sides with lower ranked ones? Draw them out of a hat so that there are no knockout pools to eliminate threatening rivals.

Then let the fixtures committee (the SA Schools Rugby Association) use their years of experience to do their jobs and match the teams for their second fixtures on the quality of rugby they played while (probably) winning those games.

Everyone will have something to play for in their second outings and the last day’s fixtures can match the two best sides, the way Doc Craven wanted it done.

And the lesser sides will not be relegated to the early games, playing each other, year after year.

This was never supposed to be a knockout competition.