The Craven Week is not what it used to be

I’m not going to be at the Craven Week this year. I’ve been to the last 16 weeks in a row, and to 27 of the last 30, so it will be a little strange, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some serious FOMO.

Then again, I’ll be watching the games on TV, in the warmth, far away from what the late Zandberg Jansen called “Bloemfontein se eie-sortige vrek koue” (Bloemfontein’s unique deathly cold) and there’s a lot I won’t be missing.

I’m afraid the Craven Week is just not what it used to be – and I think I’ve earned the right to that opinion. The change was slow and insidious. It began after Danie Craven’s passing in 1993, when his insistence that this was a festival, with no overall winner and no individual honours was undermined, then ignored. The professionalisation of the game after the 1995 World Cup didn’t take long to trickle down to this level and, while that was a good thing in terms of conditioning and preparation, it brought an emphasis on winning that was never very healthy.

At the same time, unification happened, and transformation began, those were obviously good things, but the attitude of those running the game in the provinces never kept pace (some still haven’t fully accepted it) and that has led to a set of evils which are a topic of their own.

In around 2000 the age cut-off for the week was changed from under-19 to under-18. That was a development which would have deep consequences. It meant that most players now have one Craven Week only. Earlier, many of them played twice, and some even three times. There was an immediate drop in the number of standout players at the week. It was about experiences (and an extra year of muscle growth) and the biggest stars in my early years were those who were at their second or third weeks.

At the schools around the country, repeating grade 11 was quite a common practice for star rugby players in those days. But, if there was no chance of playing at the Craven Week in matric, there was little point in that. So, instead of ensuring that your first team would remain competitive by keeping your own players for an extra year, the schools began looking for players elsewhere, and the curse of poaching and recruitment had its origin right there.

And then, while we were not paying attention, SuperSport hi-jacked the whole thing. Their relationship with SA Rugby made them all-important. They weren’t interested in broadcasting a wishy-washy traditional festival, so the current format, with the first round of matches serving as quarterfinals for the top eight seeded teams, followed by semifinals and a final was, undoubtedly, made for television.

The rest of the teams at the week are fillers now – there to pass the time until the real action begins. And I, along with my print media colleagues, didn’t count for much either. I remember the 2000 week in Port Elizabeth where there was a round of matches at township venues. The TV people arrived the week before and selfishly set themselves up in the limited accommodation, forcing us to spend the day on the stands in the blazing sun and howling wind. All the games are televised and they kick off when the TV producer says so. Tough luck for the paying spectators and the printed schedule.

While this was going on, the professionalisation of the game continued apace. All the big unions set up stall at the week, with their university partners in tow, and contracting players became the biggest game in town. The dropping of a national under-19 interprovincial competition and SARU’s cap on the number of players that can be contracted will put the brakes on that, of course, and it’s going to be interesting to see how that will change the dynamics.

So, in it’s 45^th year the Craven Week bears little resemblance to what it used to be. Better or worse? Who am I to say? I just am glad that I’m sleeping in my own bed this week.

Craven Week selecting is a whole new ball game

The Craven Week has been, for years, a fantastic rugby occasion. The best young players in the land all appearing on the same field in a never-ending stream of all that’s best about schoolboy rugby. It’s something to see and I’ve been fortunate to see it, almost without a break, for the past 30 years.

What makes it even more special are the traditions surrounding the week. Danie Craven, the man it was named after was adamant that it should be a festival, not a tournament, and that attractive, running rugby should be what everyone should strive for.

Those traditions have been dropped, quite long ago now. It’s become a tournament in all but name, driven by the TV coverage and feeding off the South African rugby mentality that believes winning is what counts and it doesn’t matter what the process on the way to victory is.

Another thing Craven insisted on was that every member of the various squads had to play one full game at the week. He didn’t want the reserves to be just bench-warmers. That one’s still in place, although it has morphed into something else entirely as transformation and racial representativity have become more and more a part of the week.

The provincial squads have been announced and it’s three weeks until the kick off. I wonder how many people know that every 23-man squad, from this year, has to have at least 12 players of colour in its ranks. That there have to be at least four players of colour on the field at any time and that, by the end of  the second round of fixtures, every player must have played a full game, with everyone getting chance to start a match.

Those arrangements aren’t there to give everyone a game. They are designed to prevent the coaches from taking a “first choice XV and group of reserves” approach. The reasons are obvious. There’s a perception that provinces will pick the 12 reserves and use them only as replacements while the 11 first choice boys will play most of the time.

There's a veiled accusation of racism in that, probably justified in some cases. It has, however, changed the dynamics of team selection and match day lineups drastically. It’s running the week along lines that are not totally rugby-related.

There has been more than the usual amount of outrage around the selections this year, in Joburg and around the country (I’d guess). The Golden Lions team has nine representatives from the school that is fourth best, at most, while the 1^st and second ranked teams have four and two players in the squad, respectively.

Well, if teams one and two are just about completely made up of white players they can’t expect to dominate a selection that has to feature 12 players of colour. It’s more complicated that that, though. It was explained to me by one of the current provincial coaches that the requirement that eight of the first day’s starting lineup have to sit out the second game means that you have to, in effect, chose two separate teams.

You pair players, he explained – when A sits out, he will be replaced by B, without weakening the team, and so on. That changes things. You no longer pick the best 23 overall, your selection has to take the “two team” reality into consideration.

In rugby, anywhere else in the world, you select your bench to cover positions in case of injury, or to provide impact late in the game. Not at the Craven Week. There the coaches are not allowed to make tactical substitutions in the first game, and in the second only the seven players who played on day one can be substituted, unless there are injuries. Given the way rugby has developed around the world, we are asking our Craven Week coaches to manage a completely different game.

And it has to happen in the context of the compulsory quota. It’s made a difficult job almost impossible. It’s gone way beyond choosing the best player in each position and expecting the top teams in each region to supply the bulk of the representatives. That’s what happens in normal rugby. This is something else altogether.

On that basis, I hesitate to do what I usually do at this time of the year: predict which provincial teams are going to stand out at the week. Some of the websites have done it already, I see. In the past I’d look at the top performing schools in the land and assume the provinces that they are located in will be the ones to watch.

These days that’s only half of the story.

The professionals should be producing the pros, not the schools

An article on the All Out Rugby website last week made for interesting reading:

https://www.alloutrugby.com/why-school-power-doesnt-translate-to-pros/

It’s by Brendon Shields who is a rugby match statistics guru who makes a good case for using the numbers that come from a statistical analysis of games as a coaching tool.

The gist of his article is that the mismatches that have resulted from the widening gap between our top schools and the rest are bad for the development of young players because they don’t learn to think on the field – their physical dominance means they don’t have to – victory (by a big margin) is guaranteed anyway.

He’s absolutely right. It’s one of the major side-effects of the emergence of “super schools”. The justification of the expense that’s needed to produce and sustain them is, of course, that they have to win every week. And if they can win by 50 points or more everyone is that much happier.

That, he says, is why our dominance at school level doesn’t translate into dominance at international level, post-school. I’m a big fan of Brendon’s work – that kind of in-depth analysis is right up my street. He suggests that SA Rugby should get involved and that some sort of premier league be established which will see the top schools play each other every weekend. There won’t be easy games anymore and the sides will be evenly matched, physically, so they will have to learn to think on their feet.

Absolutely. Coach players that way and organise their match schedule so that every game is a close contest and we will no longer see players trying to bash their way through all the time.

Where I differ, though, is in his proposed solution. It would be perfect for the production of professional rugby players, which will lead to better performances at Super Rugby and Test level. That’s not the job of the schools, though.

Rugby at the higher levels has become big business. It’s an entertainment industry and the players, coaches and referees are being paid to perform. It’s an attritional game, so you need a pipeline of new recruits coming through, constantly. The paying customers – the fans – demand success, and they vote with their feet if they don’t like what they see, as Super Rugby has found out recently.

Those who are putting on the show, and making money from it, are surely responsible for its growth and sustainability. They have shifted that load to the schools, and everyone seems to be falling for it. The business of schools is education. Sport can be part of that, of course, and rugby is a good game to use as an educational tool – it teaches lessons and instills values that have been articulated many times. The objective of any game is to win, nothing wrong with that. But from an educational point of view it’s not all-important.

Rugby is meant to teach valuable lessons, it has a spot for all shapes and sizes, it gets large numbers of boys and girls active, in the open air, and it’s how school spirit is built and how tradition and healthy rivalry with other schools is fostered.

So, I’m afraid, that while recognising the way school rugby is structured so that the good schools play against each other every week in some sort of national “league”, will make for better professional players, it should never happen.

The professional rugby structures should be nurturing their future pros, the educationists have other things they should be doing.

So, stop justifying the dishonesty and unethical practice that we all know is going on in schools in the name of serving the future needs of SA rugby. Admit that what you really want is for your first team to win, first and foremost. Any explanation, justification or proposal concerning school rugby that includes the production of future pros is irrelevant. Do your job as an educator and leave the development of professional players to those who should be running the professional game – they are taking you for a ride.

In the meantime, though, you can do worse than look at Brendon Shields’ methodology. Many coaches spend most of the game looking for fault in the referee, or for dirty play by the opponents – I know I did. It would have been great to sit down on Monday and have a look at what really went down during the game.

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