Selection - the way things are

I’m going out on a limb here and I’m probably going to get bliksemed, so I’ll get my excuse in upfront: there’s a difference between the way things should be and the way they are.

I’m going to be talking about the latter – the way it is. You may not agree with the way things work, but that’s not going to change anything.

The topic, as usual, is school rugby and it’s relevant at this time as the various provinces announce their selected teams ahead of the various Youth Weeks in July.

There’s been a bit of a hoo-hah in my hometown around the composition of the under-18 teams, particularly the “A” Craven Week side. It is dominated, numerically, by players from one school and there are three teams in the province who would most likely beat them comfortably – one of them has – yet they have markedly fewer representatives in the provincial shadow team.

I’m sure similar situations exist in other provinces around the country.

In the instance I’m talking about, the final selection hasn’t been announced yet, but it won’t change much. If you buy my argument below you’ll agree that it can’t.

Here’s where what is and what should be, start butting heads. In a perfect world, rugby-wise, the pecking order in number of representatives will follow the ranking order of the top three or four teams, and they will all have played each other, to make that ranking accurate. Then there may or may not be a few exceptional outliers from other schools included in the mix.

But they don’t all play each other around here and, anyway, team selection is way more complicated than that. There are trials of course, where players are expected to shine as individuals, and there’s been an elite player squad going since shortly after last year’s provincial season, so the coaches and selectors have access to measured physical attributes and skills levels for most of the top players.

In a perfect world, again, those things will contribute to getting team selections right, rugby-wise. But it’s not a perfect world, is it? And the biggest issue – one that those railing at the unfairness of an inferior team supplying most of the players don’t mention – is the compulsory quota system that is in place.

Officially, it’s a target not a quota, but in reality it’s not negotiable and every team complies with it. For the 2019 under-18 Craven Week, the under-18 Academy Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo and Academy Weeks, the target is 12 players of colour in each 23-man squad (50% plus 1). And the contentious selection I’m talking about meets that requirement, with the majority of players from the school in question being black.

In that perfect world, again, SA Rugby-driven development programmes, sufficient funding of coaches and equipment and rugby schools in each province who are committed to transforming their 1^st teams would have led, by now, to a situation where having half the teams made up of black players wouldn’t be an issue. The talent is there, no-one denies that, and the majority of the good players will come from the majority of the population. That’s just common sense.

But rugby doesn’t exist in that world. Instead, most of the provinces scrape and scramble to meet that compulsory quota, and this is reflected in their performance at the Craven Week. They may have the top schools in their regions, but if those schools field teams that are made up predominantly of white players, and if they don’t go to the trouble and expense to diversify their elite player base, they will be at a disadvantage.

Recent Craven Week history shows that four provinces have emerged as the top contenders: Western Province, The Golden Lions, The Sharks and Eastern Province. What distinguishes those teams from the others is the quality of their black players.

In the case of WP and EP it’s organic – those are the areas where rugby has a history of rugby as a sport of choice among black children and where many schools in the township areas play the game. Strong, formerly white, schools and black players who are selected on merit, that’s the formula for success.

That history doesn’t exist in Gauteng, or in KwaZulu-Natal. In those parts of the country success has largely been the result of affirmative action. Proper affirmative action, not just a selection policy that inserts the requisite number of black players into representative teams.

Proper affirmative action is about seeking out and finding potential and then taking action to affirm it. It means forking out for bursaries to lure talented players to your school. Then it requires giving them special attention in terms of coaching, socialisation, pastoral care, academic support and provision of rugby opportunities.

That’s how you level the playing field. It isn’t easy, and you will take knocks along the way, but at the end of the process you will, hopefully, have rugby players who can hold their own at the Craven Week and – as has happened quite often – who turn out to be the stars of the show.

Sure, those schools may not be able to beat the top dogs in their towns, but they will be where a large proportion those 12 players of colour who have to go to the Craven Week will come from.

That’s just common sense. If you are sending 12 or 13 white players to the trials, only a few of them are going to make it, even if you think they are better than some of those who are selected. Don’t complain, that’s just the way things are.