Good men, not good players. That's what it's really all about

I, like many I guess, didn’t know why the running out of Jos Buttler at the bowler's end by Ravi Ashwin in the Indian Premier League recently is called a “mankad”.

So, I Googled it, and found out that this type of dismissal was named after Indian bowler Vinoo Mankad, who dismissed Australia’s Bill Brown in this fashion during the second Test in Sydney in 1947. It was the second time he got Brown out in that way on that tour and it caused a mighty uproar. The name stuck after that.

I’d never heard the term before, although I have come across incidents where backing up batsmen have been warned by the bowler and I always thought the laws of the game required that to happen before the batsman could be dismissed in this way.

It turns out that there’s nothing in the laws, or in the MCC guidance notes on the Spirit of Cricket, saying that there has to be a warning, so the dismissal in he IPL was perfectly legal and that’s the end of it.

It’s not really the end of it though, is it? Cricket, in particular, is a game that teaches life lessons all over the place, that’s why it’s such a good sport to play in schools.

The expression “it’s just not cricket” is what that’s all about and although it may be an old fashioned concept with a bit of a paternalistic, colonial tint to it, the principle behind it is not.

It means just what the mankad debate is all about – sometimes the right thing to do is not in the laws, but it is the right thing to do. If you don’t do it it’s, well, just not cricket.

Cricket’s a good game for teaching values to school sportsmen and women, but any game will do the same, it all depends on the way it’s coached and managed.

I firmly believe that the real reason we include sport in the school curriculum is to develop the young people involved into good human beings who can go out into the world one day and make a positive contribution.

It may be that they do that as professional players, but that’s incidental, that’s not the reason why we run sporting programmes at schools.

Any teacher or coach responsible for the running of a school sport programme who doesn’t have in mind that the most important task is to teach children to behave honourably and according to the values and ethics that are included in the ephemeral “spirit of the game” is not, in my opinion, doing his or her job.

And a cricket coach who teaches a bowler to mankad a batsman, or for that matter, tells a batsman that it’s OK to steal a yard backing up because there’s no chance that he will be mankaded, should be fired.

Let’s send young people out into the world who do good because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s just not cricket to do otherwise.

Can I add an example from the weekend past that, for me illustrates what I’m talking about?

I was sent a copy of an e-mail to the principal of a school congratulating his boys on their behaviour at an airport on their way back from one of the weekend rugby festivals. I won’t say which school but the name wouldn’t surprise anyone who, like me, spends a lot of time among schoolboys in Joburg.

The boys, just hours after what must have been a devastating, narrow defeat that afternoon, sprung to the assistance of two different mothers struggling with babies, prams and bulky luggage, in the wind, and cheerfully saw them on and off the plane and onto the airport bus.

No real losers in that team – they have been taught, and they have learnt, the more important lessons that, in this case, rugby is meant to teach.

Danone competition offers some light in soccer's darkness

In the days when my job forced me to listen to what people like him had to say, I recall hearing Dennis Mumble, the CEO of SAFA, tell audiences more than once that one of the problems with South African football was that the “white” schools play rugby and won’t let their boys play soccer.

By “white” he was referring to the former model C and private schools where, we all know, the majority of pupils are black, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that he was lying, and he knew he was.

I can say that because I saw him, on more than one occasion, at tournaments and matches involving those sorts of schools and where the white players on the fields were certainly in the minority. Where he was correct is that the rugby-playing schools don’t generally enter the SA Schools Football Association’s tournaments in the various age groups. Those competitions run throughout the year and will disrupt other sporting programmes. Why is that a problem necessarily? They will tell you that they want their boys to be involved with a range of activities, in summer and winter, and soccer season runs from August to October.

Only three months? True. But in that time the soccer teams at Joburg’s boys schools play roughly twice as many matches than their rugby teams do in their five-month season. And they are proper games, on good fields, in proper kit, well-refereed etc. In short, the soccer players benefit from the advantaged positions that those well-resourced schools hold.

It isn’t fair, but it’s not the reason why Bafana Bafana struggle the way they do. In fact, good leadership should surely be able to find a way to turn the quality that exists in that system to the advantage of soccer as a whole.

Instead, like Mr Mumble, they choose to pretend it doesn’t exist.

There is, however, a chink of light. It’s at primary school level where for the third year now schools from the Johannesburg Primary Schools Football Association -the body that runs the game at the former model C and private schools - are playing in the under-12 Danone Nations Cup competition.

The primary schools play soccer in the second term, of course, so timing’s not a problem. And importantly, the organisers have bent the existing model a bit to accommodate them. They have their own regional playoff system, which they have woven into their traditional-fixtures way of doing things and a slot has been created at the Gauteng provincial finals of the competition for the team that comes through.

Not all the Joburg schools enter – it takes a bit longer for all minds to shift – but the numbers are increasing and all the signs are positive.

No team from that side of the draw has made it through to the competition’s national finals yet. Perhaps they aren’t as good as they thought they were after all, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that a significant barrier has been breached and, for the kids involved, new things have been experienced and new acquaintances made. And it’s good for the game.

That’s what sport, and education, is supposed to be about, and those on both sides of this particular issue need to make more of it happen.