The Makhanda Khaya Majola Week was as good as it gets

 

The first Khaya Majola Week I went to was in 1989. It was still the Nuffield Week back then and it was in Johannesburg. That was the first year that I was engaged as a freelance journalist – I was still a teacher then – and I was to cover every week, bar one or two, as a journalist until 2018 when the Saturday Star School Sport supplement was canned by the new owners of Independent Media.

By then, I’d become so much a part of proceedings that the organisers – more about them later – found a way to keep me coming.

I have to admit to an increasing level of grumpiness as I’ve grown older and I’ve, unkindly, been accused be of being cynical and complaining. I suppose I’d have to agree, to an extent, with that and that I went to Makhanda for the 2023 Khaya Majola Week with a less than fully positive attitude.

I got back home on Thursday cured, for now at least. I guess what I needed was to meet up with and mingle with people who make big sacrifices to provide opportunities for schoolboy cricketers to play the game, and to be engulfed in the spirit of generosity and the attention to detail that characterises the hospitality you get when these events are held in a small town.

And so it was in Makhanda. The tournament began with an official opening at which a guest speaker was to address the boys. A mistake, I thought. The players don’t want to hear what some self-important has-been has to say, they just want to play. But I was wrong, the speaker was Adi Birrell who has a coaching CV as long as your arm. He imparted some homespun Eastern Cape wisdom and his message was aimed straight at the players. It was spellbinding, and it set the tone for what was to come.

Graeme College – the Grahamstown school that isn’t St Andrew’s or Kingswood – was the venue and at that opening function I met Kevin Watson, the headmaster of Graeme, and Gregg van Molendorff, his deputy and the man in charge of the local organising committee. They were in our faces, in the nicest possible way, for the rest of the week.

Mr Watson is just remarkable. I’ve been to many of these sorts of things. But I’ve never seen the headmaster of the host school take ownership of the event the way he did. He was out there supervising the rolling of the wicket, painting the lines himself, and pulling the covers off – you don’t see that every day, but it went further. His mission seemed to be to make everyone feel at home and enjoying themselves. And at the closing dinner at the end of it, I watched him go around the room thanking everyone for their contribution. Even me, who really didn’t do that much.

He had a willing and able accomplice in Gregg van Molendorff. I’ve come across organisers of big events who pay attention to the details and make sure the proceedings run like clockwork. And I’ve seen others who are more people orientated and concentrate on relationships with the visitors. He was both, and then some. Indefatigable, always smiling and completely incapable of saying no to any request.

They were the locals. The CSA people were also there. Morgan Pillay, the tournament director for 28 years now, is simply the best sports administrator I’ve ever come across. Niels Momberg, for many years CSA’s manager of Youth and Tertiary Cricket, has been promoted to another role and in that one he is in charge of umpires and scorers, among other things. So, guess what? He used that as an excuse to spend the week in Makhanda anyway, and miss yet another birthday with his family.

Morgan’s birthday is the day before Neils’s, by the way, so he has also been away for it for close to 30 years now.

The men in charge set the tone and everyone else involved with running the event followed suit. At some tournaments and festivals it’s all about exclusion. Not everyone’s invited to the functions, you have to have the right accreditation to get into certain areas and they kick you out at closing time.

Not at this one. You got the idea that, of course you’re welcome – they made sure of that.

And then there was the setting. The schools of Grahamstown are pristine exceptions to the rule in a town that’s crumbling. The potholed roads have become famous, as have the wild donkeys roaming the streets.

There were matches at the clubs of the Farmers League in the surrounding areas. We took a drive to Salem, reportedly the oldest cricket field in the country. It was magical.

My colleague Hannes Nienaber and I had a beer in the pub there – he has a strong regard for the history and traditions of the game, and in that spirit, we also had to have a beer at the Rat and Parrot, the heart of university life in the town – although it was eerily quiet with the students not there.

It’s all about cricket and the players, of course, and I got the feeling that they were having a great time too. It showed in their play. There were some great performances and they can only have benefitted from playing on those fields, in those historic settings.

I wrote once before that if I was in charge the Khaya Majola Week will always be held in Potchefstroom. The fields are great and they are all close to each other, and the people there are just so nice. After the week gone by, I think we can alternate between Potch and Makhanda – it’s even better down there.

My top 10 school sports moments in 2023

 

I’ve been compiling these little end-of-the-year top 10 highlights lists since about 2009 when the Saturday Star began running a school sport supplement. At first it was a way to fill a page during the “silly season” in December – when there had to be a newspaper, but there was no real news to fill it.

I got to enjoy doing it and there were those who enjoyed reading it, it seems, so I kept it going on this platform after School Sport was closed down. From the beginning I made it a rule that I would only include games and events that I had actually attended, or watched on TV, at the least. That became more challenging when I stopped working and there were no longer sponsored trips to weeks and tournaments and I began to rely on the rare televised schools games and the bigger interprovincial competitions that did get aired.

And then, along came SuperSport Schools. It’s been a game-changer for me and my trivial list year can include, as you’ll see, references to the School Boat Race, and the SA Schools Water Polo Champs, and I can say I was there – via my laptop and an HDMI cable.

1 So, highlight number one in 2023 was the growth in depth and quality of the SuperSport Schools coverage. I was able to watch the biggest rugby derbies, the interprovincial hockey and rugby weeks, the Boat Race and the SA Schools Water Polo tournament, while never leaving my couch. Who could have imagined?

2 The St Benedict’s rowing and Northcliff athletics records are still stuck, although there may have been a slight shift this year. Northcliff duly won the Joburg co-ed schools athletics interhigh for the 25^th year in a row, but they squeaked home by just 4 points over Rand Park. A disqualification here, or a dropped relay baton there, and the unbeaten run would have been history! Bennies were comfortable winners of the SA Schools Rowing Championships for the 29th consecutive year and they aren’t going anywhere. They also won the schools boat race for the sixth year in a row.

3 The St Stithians Girls water polo team were unbeaten in 60 games during the 2022/2023 season, That includes winning six national tournaments, including the big ones – the St Peter’s, Reef Cup and their own Saints Invitational.

4 It was quite a sporting year for the St Stithians family of schools. Their boys 1^st hockey team won the Aitken Cup – ending Jeppe’s streak – and their girls won the Pullen Trophy. That’s the first time that’s happened, and then they had four players selected for the SA U19 cricket team: Esosa Aihevba, Lhuan-Dre Pretorius, Richard Seletswane and Kwena Maphaka.

5 Speaking of dominant schools, there’s SACS hockey. Their 1^st team was unbeaten and ended the year as the number one ranked team. There were 11 SACS players in the WP team that won the U18 Interprovinicial Tournament. Six of them made the SA Schools team and a further four were in the SA U16 side.

6 The big schools rugby derby clashes are another perennial highlight for me. Thanks to SuperSport Schools I was able to see the Midlands derby between Michaelhouse and Hilton, K Day in Grahamstown, and the Paarl Interschools extravaganza. But the one I attended was the KES vs Jeppe double header – possibly the second biggest of them all. They were thrillers, played in front of capacity crowds and the honours were split, one win each.

7 A few weeks later we had the Rugby Youth Weeks, The U19 Academy Week was in Joburg and The Golden Lions beat Western Province in the “main game”, which wasn’t that surprising seeing that there were four or five players in the Lions side who certainly should have been at the Craven Week instead. The Jeppe/KES midfield combination was great to watch and how those players were not considered good enough for the A team can only be attributed to one-eyed selections. Instead, the selectors opted for a two-school strategy – Monument and Helpmekaar – which didn’t work: the Craven side lost two out of their three matches.  

8 and 9 – a couple of outstanding individuals, Jeppe’s Jaydon Brooker and David Teeger of King Edward. Brooker achieved a rare double, selection for both the Southern Gauteng U18 hockey team, and the Central Gauteng Lions cricket team. He was player of the tournament at the hockey interprovincial and made the SA Schools and U19 teams, Unfortunately, he has had to miss the Khaya Majola Week because he is away with the National U21 hockey team at the Junior World Cup in Kuala Lampur.

The David Teeger story is a remarkable one. He is the captain of the Central Gauteng Lions, and the SA U19 teams, although the latter almost got derailed after Cricket South Africa launched an inquiry into a pro-Israel comment he made when accepting an award. Luckily, sanity prevailed in that and he will lead the SA team at the U19 World Cup in January. The big Teeger story of the year, however, was when his KES teammates turned up at his house early one Saturday morning to walk to school with him. He comes from an Orthodox Jewish family and he chooses not to ride in a car on the Sabbath. So, he walks to school for home games and stays in a B&B on Friday night for away ones. That kind of commitment has to be admired – and it shows in his cricket.

10 The year ended with the SA Schools Water Polo tournament in Gqberha. It’s a massive event, played from U12 to U19, boys and girls. I don’t really approve of the scale of it, I don’t think provincial colours should be handed out so liberally. For me the two U19 finals are what it’s really all about, and they were thrillers. Central Gauteng won the girls game by two goals over Western Province  and WP won the boys – in a penalty shootout after they equalised with five second to go against Gauteng. It was edge-of-the-seat stuff.

11 Here’s an 11^th, just because I can. Back in May when Jeppe hosted Affies, they couldn’t field as many sides as the Pretoria powerhouse, so they asked Springs Boys’ High to fill in the gaps. The Springs 1^st team played Affies 3rds. Affies won, although I can’t remember the score, and afterwards the two teams posed, arm in arm, for a photo. An unlikely meeting between schools who exists in different dimensions, and a moving occasion.

Gauteng schools water polo - massive.

 

I was at the Gauteng Schools Water Polo capping ceremony at St Peter’s on Tuesday night, and it was quite amazing. The province is sending 22 teams to the Interprovincial tournament in Gqeberha this weekend. That’s 304 players, 40 coaches, 12 managers and seven referees.

I can’t think of many touring contingents that big, and they were all presented with certificates and scrolls on Tuesday. The ceremony was held in the air-conditioned indoor basketball facility at St Peter’s  – which made the two and a half hours it took bearable, given the heat we’ve been having in Joburg this past week. They’ve done it before, obviously, it ran like clockwork, every player got his or her moment in the spotlight and tribute was paid to some special individuals, in an appropriate manner.

All very impressive and very different to the days when I used organise these evenings. We only had two, later three, teams back then and we’d have a braai for the boys and their parents (no girls polo back then) and get someone like Hennie van Niekerk or Billy Otto to do the hand-shaking. It’s come a long way.

I’ve been critical about them letting it get so big. I’ve always felt provincial competition is an elite, not a mass participation event, and handing certificates to over 300 players is not elite. On the other hand, though, I agree that its wonderful to have that many teenagers actively engaged in healthy sport, among their friends at this time of the year – they could be doing far less positive things with their time. Water polo is a better game than most when it comes to a vehicle for teaching values and life skills. And I applaud the sacrifices made by so many teachers, coaches and administrators to make it possible.

Pros and cons to both arguments, I guess.

Where I do have some strong views is when it comes to the age at which children should be introduced to serious competitive sport. There are under-12 and under-13 categories at SA Schools polo these days, That’s 11 and 12 year-olds! Should they be introduced to the joys and heartaches of team selection, the arduous training that is part of the game, and the seriousness of a professional tournament at that age? Shouldn’t they rather be learning the basics through game situations that focus on the fun of it, with no scores being kept?

Still, seeing all those shiny smiling faces, and that array of school uniforms, on Tuesday night warmed my heart. The organisers pledged, at the ceremony, to make every step they take educationally accountable and that player safety is their priority. You can only applaud that.

 

Three festivals in one, not easy but a real highlight

 My sporting highlight of the weekend just gone by? ……… Well, the World Cup final, obviously, but apart from that, it’s got to be the four days I spent at St David’s covering their three simultaneous sports festivals, basketball, cricket and water polo.

It was the independent schools’ half term break – a custom those schools have of giving everyone a weekend off in the middle of all their frantic activity. And then, in true teacher-style, they fill it with even more frantic activity and make those running it work even harder in their break than during their time on duty.

They do it for the kids, of course, although there’s a marketing spin-off for the school, I guess. There certainly should be. It takes considerable organisational prowess to have all those games played on time, particularly at this time of the year when the weather is always a factor. And there is plenty of hard work going on behind the scenes, I sat in the media office and saw a fair part of it.

The real stars were outside though, the coaches, the referees and the boys.

Randomly, some highlights making the whole thing a highlight, included:

The ongoing Michael Mount basketball success story. The Montessori school made both finals of the Inanda Hoops tournament, their under-15s won it and their under-18s came close. The Dubravka Lunnemann legend continues. She’s an ex-parent who originally hails from Serbia who got the school on the basketball map and although she’s older now and takes a bit of a back seat, she was there with the teams at their games and I watched how the players gave her their absolute attention whenever she had something to say to them.

Putting under-12 water polo players into an international size water polo pool and telling them to swim. It’s a long way from goal to goal in a pool like that, and they are little guys. I just loved watching the effort they put in. They are going to be far better at the game for the experience they got this weekend.

The ongoing innovative thinking of Dave Nosworthy. The St David’s director of cricket has coached the game at very high levels, yet there he was, designing a T10 tournament aimed at giving 10 and 11 year-olds a fun-filled, action-packed weekend. The idea was that they should fall in love with the game and make it their choice as they get older. It was in stark contrast to his other innovation – the two-day festival for U18s, aimed at slowing it down and mastering the art of playing cricket over long periods of time.

The kids who spent the long weekend at St David’s all came away a little better at what they do – that's a real highlight to me.

Innovation is the long and short of it at St David's cricket festivals

 

I was going on the other day about the role of tradition in ongoing excellence in schools, and that it’s OK to sometimes bring in new things. Innovation is the opposite of tradition in a way, and there’s nothing wrong with it, as long as it’s in the service of the educational role of sport as a school activity.

So, while the big Inanda Hoops basketball tournament at St David’s this weekend (and I know there are other schools tournaments around the country too), is far removed from traditional school sport, and a bit weird to my conservative way of thinking, it’s a great innovation because it exposes a couple of hundred boys at a time to all sorts of new opportunities to learn sporting and life lessons.

Then, on day two of the Inanda Hoops, the St David’s prep school cricket festival kicked off. And it’s pretty innovative too. It’s for players who will still be at primary school next year, the teams wear brightly coloured shirts and have been given colourful names along the lines of the IPL teams – St David’s Dynamite, Montrose Meteors, St Stithians Supermen etc. And they are playing 10 overs-a-side matches, three in a day.

It’s all the idea of Dave Nosworthy, director of cricket at St David’s, the same man who turned traditional 1^st team festivals on their head by doing away with the usual variety of formats over four days and saying, we’ll play two two-day games at our four day event instead.

I bumped into him at St David’s on Saturday and asked him about the contrast between their two festivals – the longest format in schools cricket at one, and the shortest at the other.

I liked his reply because his reasons are grounded in educational principles and the development of the boys is at the heart of them. They are about boys at opposite ends of their school cricket lives, he told me. The U19 players at the two-day Fasken tournament are about to enter the senior ranks and they need to learn how to play multi-day games where you can build an innings, bowlers have longer spells and fielders are on their feet all day, he explained.

“This prep schools tournament is at the other end,” he said. “We want these boys to become hooked on the game, if they are going to give up a weekend they must be having fun, so the games are short and sharp, the boundaries are brought in, meaning there a plenty of runs, and they play lots of games each day. And we have introduced local rules that are aimed at full participation for every player.”

The growth of cricket is the aim, he explained, and the game is in trouble at primary schools. “Cricket isn’t being played in the third term very much anymore, with the Grade 7s being prepared for high school sports like rowing. rugby, water polo, basketball etc instead,” Nosworthy said. “We want to remind them that cricket is still a wonderful game.”

It is that, and the boys in action at St David’s this weekend are having a wonderful time, you can see it in their faces.

All sorts of lessons learnt by departing from tradition

 

An adherence to tradition, I’ve found, is one of the things that all the good schools have in common. It’s what links the present with the past and keeps the legacy alive. Current learners are told, forced sometimes, to do things the exact way that they’ve always been done and that’s how the values and expectations are passed along. It’s unlikely that long-term, sustained success can happen in the absence of tradition.

That doesn’t mean, though, that things must never change, or that change is necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve been reminded of that this weekend, attending the three festivals being hosted concurrently at St David’s Marist Inanda. These sorts of events have become a feature of the school. They already host major national tournaments in cricket and football and now, during their half-term break, they run the Inanda Hoops basketball tournament which is fast becoming a major “stayers” competition, and as if the place isn’t hectic enough, there is an under-14 water polo tournament on at the same time, and a primary school T10 cricket tournament too.

 So, why did it get me thinking about the role of tradition? It’s the basketball, mainly. I don’t recall reporting on the sport too much in my days at the Saturday Star, and I only left there in 2016. Yet, now we have a tournament like this one. The scale of it, the level of organisation, and the facilities: it’s being played on four courts, the main one an arena capable of hosting games at the highest level. And it’s all accompanied by loud music, with a DJ getting the crowds hyped up.

It flies in the face of tradition. Not so long ago, many schools were dubious about the game, some even refused to offer it. The TV images of street basketball in the States, with its gangster culture scared them off. Even the professional game, as we see it on TV, has players that cannot be called good role models and practices that are hardly educational.

But, school demographics have changed, a new generation of boys and their parents want to play the game and the schools have had to change. It was confirmed to me that change is not always bad when I observed the teams in action at St David’s. Sport at school has to be an educational activity, no argument, if you cannot justify everything that is happening educationally, then it shouldn’t be happening.

And I saw all sorts of lessons being taught and learnt at the Inanda Hoops, in the midst of all that noise and apparent chaos. Take the mix of schools involved, for instance. The top independent schools were there, but so was a team from Soweto, and the local state schools too. That creates opportunities for boys to mingle with and play against people they usually won’t come into contact with. I watched Hilton College play against the King’s School, Linbro Park, and Jeppe play the Soweto Academy. All of those players went home that night knowing a little more that they did when they arrived in the morning.

Some of the coaches seemed to get a little over excited, and there were some hairstyles that wouldn’t be allowed at some schools, but the behaviour of the players was impressive. The lessons of teamwork, discipline, sportsmanship and all-out effort are being taught under some difficult circumstances, and we all know that’s when the best lessons are learnt.

Sure, it’s noisy, some of the kids dress funny and a 60 minute game can easily last two hours sometimes, but going against tradition and allowing the game in has opened up all sorts of educational possibilities.

And St David’s have compressed all of those into a manic four days, and provided a structure for it all, amazingly, to run with precision. 

It’s been wonderful to see.

 

Proper football development - two types, one field

 

Two of my favourite school sports events took place within a week of each other. The 6^th annual Kensington Community Cup soccer tournament was played last Wednesday, and this week, the U15 Iqhawe rugby week is on.

Nothing strange about that – it’s a calendar thing – but, this time, they both happened on the same field: Collard, the main rugby field at Jeppe High School for Boys. Jeppe organises the Kensington Community Cup, a tournament involving teams from the immediate area around the school; while the Iqhawe Week is an SA Rugby Youth Week, run by the SA Rugby Legends organisation, and this is the second year in a row that Jeppe has hosted the teams, although last year the games were played at the Johannesburg Stadium.

The idea with the Community Cup is to arrange a series of games for the local schools – who hardly ever meet each other - and to include a Jeppe team that never plays against those schools, even though they are all within a 5km radius of each other. Sponsors are found to give the players a good meal and each team goes home with a fancy bag filled with new footballs, as well as a set of training bibs and some cones.

 I wasn’t happy to hear that this year it was played as a tournament, with a final, and that individual prizes were awarded – in the past it was festival, with no points awarded and no individuals singled out. I completely miscalculated what a big deal it all was for those teams and players, and the spectators they brought with them. The winners of the final, Jules High, were over the moon and the losers, Kensington Secondary, were devastated. The boys named as the best players on the day were so excited and their supporters overjoyed. It was something to see.

Sadly, that’s about as good as it gets for those players – unless the best of them gets spotted somehow and gets into the youth academy of one of the professional clubs. There really isn’t much organised sport at those schools and SAFA has never done much in terms of broad-based grassroots development (and then they wonder why other African countries, where the professional game is way behind where ours is, but where there are national development programmes, beat us in continental competitions).

The situation is a bit better with rugby, although the challenges there are greater. There is pressure from all sides to make the game demographically representative – code for less white – at the top levels, and we all know that achieving that is a numbers game: to get more elite black players you need more black players at the grassroots level.

Yet, those masses of potential players are at the same dysfunctional schools that the soccer players are at, and it's way more complex to get rugby going from scratch. The rugby authorities are fortunate in that the organisation of rugby at school level in SA is arguably the best in the world. They have used that in their quest for transformation by encouraging the established schools to bring in talented black players through bursaries and, as a result, there are plenty of black players in the top 1^st teams around the country and many of them go to the SA Rugby Youth Weeks. It means that the compulsory race quotas in those teams are met, but it is increasingly going much further than that, and in most years, the best players at the Craven Week are black.

It’s not entirely honest, those elite black players aren’t coming from any sort of grassroots programme, and the number of township and rural schools playing rugby isn’t increasing, but it’s a model that’s working – the black stars shining for the Springboks at the World Cup this month almost all went to the top rugby schools in the country.

Football isn’t emulating it in any way. It’s simply not true to say that the private and former Model C schools don’t have football programmes, it hasn’t been true for many years. There are high quality, mass participation development systems at many of them, and fiercely competitive, well organised competitions. Last weekend Grey College (SA’s undisputed top rugby school, by the way), held its 18^th Nedbank Soccer tournament. The majority of players in action there were black, as they are at all of the half a dozen or so similar tournaments held during the short, intense schools football season that takes place at this time of the year.

SAFA is simply not interested, they still pretend the game doesn’t exist at those schools and no attempt is being made to make their programmes part of the player development pathway, the way that rugby does.

What I like about the Iqhawe Week is that it is aimed at keeping rugby alive in places where it is in trouble. The SA Rugby Legends Association -all ex-Springboks – runs a programme called Vuka that organises leagues and playing opportunities for boys and girls who are not at established rugby schools. They help out with equipment and coaching too. From there they have a regional competition, and an interprovincial week – the Iqhawe Week. The provinces send U15 teams to it, with the proviso that players from their established schools must not be picked.

The Golden Lions union – where there are many schools with rugby field and posts, at least - decided that their team will come from schools who field four teams or less in inter-school matches. In addition to that, they run a Vuka programme in the townships, with about 29 schools involved. The problem there, according to Tim Goodwin of the Lions Union, is that they don’t play enough quality matches in their season. That’s an area where the established schools can help. I overheard the Jeppe people talking about getting teams from there to fill in the gaps in their fixtures. I won’t be surprised if that were to happen – that sort of thing is in Jeppe’s DNA.

I’m on record that I disapprove of player recruitment. The Iqhawe Week is an exception. From the start, the idea was that some of these players should be taken up by the established schools. I saw scouts from quite a number of established schools at Jeppe this week – you could recognise them by the chequebooks sticking out of their back pockets. While you can’t justify taking a player who is already a star away from a school that has a functioning rugby programme by saying it’s in his best interests; giving a player who shows potential, but is unlikely to realise it where he is, a chance at an established centre of excellence is a different matter. There were, I’m told, 22 players who were granted bursaries by top schools at last year’s week.

And they are choosing a team this year that will play in the U16 Khomo Week next year. The scouts will be watching them too, I’d wager.

Two highlights of the week for me – in the same place

The lessons learnt were evident at the 2-day cricket

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? ….. I was only at one event all weekend, and the SA cricket team is the workiest of works in progress at the moment, so it has to be the St David’s Marist cricket festival.

I’ve said plenty  about how much I like the concept of non-limited overs cricket at school level and the cricketing and life lessons that can be taught via it. There were certainly many of those evident over the four days. Two of the captains declared their first innings while their teams were behind. Both those games ended in draws anyway, but they understood the concept of risking losing to have a chance of victory. In contrast, there several cases where sides batted on too long and the captains were kicking themselves, I’m sure, when the opposition were able to hold on for the draw, six or seven down, and still 50 or 60 runs short. 

There were 11 centuries, and over 30 half centuries scored in the 12 matches. Batsmen were allowed to play themselves in, and several went to bed 50 plus not out at the end of the day and had to come back the next morning and kick on from there.

There were also 14-odd five wicket hauls, all by spin bowlers. They all bowled a lot of overs and some shipped a lot of runs in the process, but they were given the opportunity to learn what their craft is all about, and their role in the complex and multi-faceted game of cricket.

Then there are the social and life lessons learnt by teenagers spending four days doing one thing in one place in the hectic times they live in. I saw teams sitting quietly in the shade watching the action together (I suspect the coaches were forcing that one); I saw an entire team disappear down the hillside at The Higher Ground to look for a lost ball; I saw many rounds of applause for opponents’ performances – 50s and 100s scored , unplayable balls bowled, and at the man of the day ceremonies at the end of each; day I saw a wicketkeeper take off his gloves and tie a batsman’s loose shoelace; and a fielder stretching out the leg of a cramping batsman.

And at the end of it all I watched the three prize winners – batsman, bowler and player of the festival – being mobbed and congratulated by players from all the teams (along with many requests for them to give them the kit and vouchers that went along with the awards).

You don’t get those sorts of things with other games. That’s cricket, and it’s the reason why so much of what we see in sport these days, including at school level, simply is not.

 

I'm part of the Fasken, and glad to be

 

Some time back there used to be rugby tournament organised by Roodepoort Rugby Club at this time of the year, for “stayers” – boys in grade 11 or younger. They had a sponsorship from the West Rand branch of ABI and it was called the Coca-Cola series.

That sponsorship disappeared at some stage, but the tournament went on (it’s gone now, I think, and the Rand Leases ground where it used to be held is now an informal settlement I’m told) but it was still referred to as the “Coke series” for as long as it survived.

I was reminded of that story this weekend while attending the St David’s Time Cricket Festival because we were discussing the value of branding and how the quality of a sponsored event (sporting in this case) can create an enduring bond between the sponsor and the occasion.

The St David’s festival is sponsored by Sandton Law firm Fasken, this is the sixth year of the partnership and already the name has stuck. “Are you going to the Fasken week this year?” “Gee, we wish we could be invited to the Fasken next year.” Those are phrases spoken among schools cricket people that I’ve heard, and I’m sure those sorts of things are said quite often in those circles.

This is the Fasken Festival, no question. I’ve no idea how long-standing the sponsorship will be, but they, together with the very clever marketing people at St David’s, have made their brand part of the schools cricket lexicon. And what the word means is “long format time cricket.”

Two-day matches are something unique in schools cricket and they are based on both cricket and educational principles, which is why the concept has caught on and why there is a demand from schools around the country to be included, which can’t happen until someone who is here drops out, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

I’m not just saying the St David’s marketing department people are clever because they invite me each year to say nice things about their event. They’ve applied the marketing principle of differentiating themselves and standing out from the crowd by finding a niche – this type of cricket, and a football tournament that is inclusive in its outlook – and overdelivered in terms of organisation, facilities, level of competition and hospitality.

There’s a case study in there, I think. I’m lucky and glad to be part of it.

And I get to watch another set of two-day games involving some of the fabled cricketing schools of the land, starting today!

The lessons of the longer game

 

I’m off to St David’s this morning to watch the cricket – the same games I watched yesterday, and most of them aren’t even half way through yet. They started at 9 yesterday morning and they’ll go on until 6 tonight and, even then, it’s likely that some won’t be finished and they’ll be called draws.

And everyone will be back again tomorrow for the next round of games, which will carry on until Sunday night and, again, some of them won’t produce results.

There are many who question the sanity of a sport that allows that to happen – it drives the Americans to distraction. There you have extra time in every game, at every level, there has to be a result, they say – otherwise why play?

What’s happening at St David’s is time cricket and at international level it goes on for five days and even then there might not be a winner in the end. And the amazing thing is that cricket people (the purists, anyway) love it. So do the international players – they make their living out of shorter formats of the game, but just about every time you hear one of them being asked, they say Test cricket is what the game is all about.

The Fasken Time Cricket Festival on at St David’s this weekend is school sport, remember, and school sport should be education first, competition second. That’s something I’m always banging on about, although it’s a losing battle. Winning has become so important that, in most codes but especially rugby, school sport has become pretty much professional in its approach.

That applies to cricket too and you see the worst of it in the shorter formats of the game, like T20. It shouldn’t be that way. Cricket has the potential to be a great educational tool, and good schools and coaches see it that way. That’s not to say that winning isn’t important, it is the point of playing, but it’s not the only thing.

Which is the great thing about this festival. It was born out of a recognition that the cricketing education of school boys is incomplete if they are fed a diet of limited overs cricket only. But it also recognises that school cricket can and must teach other lessons too.

The learnings are well articulated in the festival brochure – things like building an innings, bowling an intense spell, and coming back to do it again later; fielding for an entire day, and coming back to do it again tomorrow; and for the captains, the art of declaration – risking loss to give yourself a chance of victory, and buying a wicket by keeping your run-leaking spinner on a while longer. Think of the business lessons in those last two points.

It's a cricket tradition to appreciate your opponents – the players will applaud an opponent when he scores a 50 or 100, in which other game do you get that? And coaches will generally talk about their opponents more that themselves, I heard that in the bar at St David’s last night again.

And that’s another point that the Fasken Festival intentionally makes. The players are told to watch their opponents appreciatively all day and decide who performed the best out of them. And after the day’s play, their captain will present him with a purple cap and they will applaud him. Who cares if at the end of the two days the game is drawn – those little ceremonies alone are victories in my eye.

Cricket's here - that's my highlight

 

Lots to choose from when deciding on a highlight of the week gone by.

The Boks hammering the All Blacks, of course – dare we hope? And that ovation for Siya Kolisi from the crowd.

The last gasp win by Rondebosch over Bishops in a Cape Town Southern suburbs derby that lived up to that description; watching KES and Jeppe draw 1-1 on the main rugby field at KES – and remembering that when we first tried to introduce football at Joburg schools, KES refused and, if the story’s correct, soccer balls were once totally banned on the so-called Reds field; Garsfontein’s Noordvaal trophy win over EG Jansen – their first since 2016 – with Monument winning the U14 and 15 finals and Helpmekaar the U16, showing that recruitment is alive and well the in Golden Lions Schools; and the news that Rand Park High came within four points of Northcliff at the Joburg co-ed schools athletics interhigh – seriously threatening that 26-year unbeaten run.

But, for me, it’s been the drawing of circles around the frost-bleached fields around town, ignoring the lanes marked out and the fading touch and try lines – cricket season is here. It’s been a long, cold winter and we felt this weekend that it isn’t over yet, but I have faith that come next Thursday, when 12 of the top schools descend on St David’s Marist Inanda, the weather will turn and we can settle down to a different kind of excitement.

And the St David’s Fasken festival is different. The teams play two games each, with two days set aside for each. It’s time cricket. Which means its not limited overs. The captains are expected to declare and set targets, if their side isn’t bowled out, just like in Test cricket.

This is the fourth time the format is being used – the man behind it is former provincial coach Dave Nosworthy – and the idea is to teach the boys a whole bunch of new skills, cricketing and other. I love the idea, and so do a lot of school coaches – there’s a waiting list of teams wanting to be invited.

So, the World Cup’s coming and rugby will be occupying our minds, but the great game – that’s what St David’s headmaster Mike Thiel calls it, seeing that football has appropriated the name the “beautiful game” – will be what I’ll be watching next weekend.

The fixtures for the St David’s Fasken Festival are:

 August 31 and September 1 - Jeppe vs Clifton (Gier Oval, St David’s), St David’s vs Maritzburg College (La Valla Oval, St David’s), Lions vs KES (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs Waterkloof (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), St John’s vs St Andrew’s (Baytop Oval, St Stithians), Paul Roos vs Noordheuwel (La Rosey Oval, St David’s).

September 2 and 3 – Jeppe vs Paul Roos (Gier Oval, St David’s), St David’s vs Lions (La Valla Oval, St David’s), KES vs Clifton (La Rosey Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs St Andrew’s (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), St John’s vs Maritzburg College (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), Noordheuwel vs Waterkloof (Baytop Oval, St Stithians).

The St David's festival was a good way to see the new season in

 

So, the 2023 winter schools sport season is over, and the quite spectacular St David’s Challenge Cup soccer tournament saw the new one in last weekend.

The standard of play, someone who knows the game far better that I do said, wasn’t as high as it has been in some years, but the sheer size of the thing, the number of boys involved, the number of games they played and the quality of the organisation: the fields, officiating, catering, and the updating of the tournament standings as we went along, were outstanding.

I’ve been to lots of these things over the years, including those run by Sasfa – the schools football association that was part of SAFA, until they were kicked out because of a dispute between the bodies over funding and sponsorship - and I’d say this was a good as it could possibly be.

The event doubled in size this year with the introduction of under-14 and under-16 sections, played at St Stithians. It was a separate tournament, although it is also called the Challenge Cup, and there is some co-ordination – the idea is that the participating schools will send teams to all four competitions, making it more of a mass participation event.

One significant difference, I thought, was that both the competitions at Saints were played as full on tournaments with cross pool playoffs, quarterfinals, semis and a final. At St David’s the U15 section was a festival. There was a division into a top eight and a bottom eight after the first rounds of games, but they then played another round-robin, with no consequences.

There was an under-15 winner at St David’s up until last year but it has been changed, I was told, on request from the headmasters of the boys schools, who don’t want U14s and 15s, who are still learning to play the game, to participate in any kind of league.

That’s why the U14 basketball and water polo tournaments that round off the 1^st term are festivals now, without winners. I’m not sure why the U14s at Saints played for a cup, they shouldn’t have.

That said, the Grade 8s, fresh out of primary school where football was the game they played, were given ample opportunity to keep on playing it – that hasn’t always been the case.

So, it’s football for the next few weeks, with the cricketers already starting to loosen up – I’ll be back at St David’s in two weeks time for the excellent Fasken Two-Day Festival, more about that later.

What we won’t be seeing is school athletics, not at the boys schools anyway. I find it strange and uncharacteristic that they seem to have capitulated on that one. I’m sure they have their reasons and I know the really serious athletes compete in more structured competitions in the first term now. But what about the others?

My experience is that there are those who aren’t much good at some of the events, but who bust a gut at them anyway. I’m going to miss watching that stoutly-built youngster who doesn’t belong anywhere near the 1500m, giving it his all to finish and earn a point for his school. And to hear the applause he gets when he comes down the straight a minute behind the winner. There used to be lessons taught and learnt that way too.

The St David's semifinalists are a fascinating mix

 

There’s an interesting mix of schools playing in the semifinals of the St David’s Marist Inanda Challenge Cup Soccer tournament today.

By the time you read this the games will probably have been played, but they featured Norkem Park vs Brebnor High School in the one, and King Edward VII School vs St Stithians College in the other.

Two who, by the standards that most of us measure sporting schools by, are not well-known, and two who have produced top teams and provincial and international players aplenty in a range of sporting codes for many years.

It’s a reflection, in the first place of the egalitarian nature of football. You don’t need a million dollar facility to play the game, nor do you need expensive equipment or fancy kit. It’s what makes it the “world game”. Although, clearly, neither Brebnor nor Norkem got to the standard that we saw at St David’s this weekend by playing pick-up games in the veld somewhere. Norkem Park are regulars at the tournament, and perennial achievers, while Brebnor are here for the first time, but they came with quite a reputation, and its well deserved.

KES and St Stithians have long and proud sporting traditions, and they offer just about every sporting activity under the sun to their learners. They both had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Joburg schools football setup. There was a referendum among the boys at KES in the 1990s, the story goes about whether they wanted to play soccer or rugby and soccer won. The result was buried by the authorities who were hoping to use it to keep soccer out of the school! St Stithians were reluctant participants at first, mainly because the difference in term dates between state and private schools made it difficult to fit a season in.

Well, they are certainly both in it now, and they do have the facilities and equipment required to run top-class programmes. KES, simply, takes everything they do seriously, and St Stithians have put a lot of time and effort into soccer as an area where they have the potential to differentiate themselves.

Those trying to make sense of the absurd situation of South African soccer being where it is on the international rankings, despite having possibly the best league on the continent and certainly the best facilities, often blame it on the fact that our so-called top schools are rugby institutions, where the boys are not allowed to practice the round ball code.

They are wrong. Soccer is, of course, played at the vast majority of schools across the land, and thanks to schools like St David’s who go to the trouble to put on events like the Challenge Cup, almost all of the so-called rugby schools also have excellent football programmes too.

So, the problem is not one of access to the game, it’s one of not optimally using the school system as the major developmental nursery the way that the other sporting codes, like rugby, do.

I never saw a Safa official or a scout from one of the professional clubs at St David’s this weekend. They should be here – there are players in those four semi-finalist teams that they should be taking a look at. And they aren’t the only ones in action in Inanda this weekend.

 

Back at the place where it all began

 

The last few schools rugby matches are being played this weekend, but there’s no doubt that the first weekend of August, in Joburg, belongs to the beautiful game.

It’s St David’s Marist Inanda Soccer Challenge Cup time – it’s been that way since 2003. I was at the opening day on Friday and it occurred to me that the 576 boys in action there probably had no appreciation for the role that St David’s has played in making football the growing school sport that it is.

When Shane Gaffney, director of sport at St David’s at the time, first had the idea of a tournament like this part of the idea was to kick-start the game in the boys schools in Joburg. Football in the third term was only beginning to take root and it was mainly the Model C co-ed schools who participated, along with St David’s and Highlands North. The boys schools, until then were fiercely resisting the idea of introducing the game at their rugby-obsessed schools, but when they saw a well-run tournament, based on sound educational principles was in place and that it was attracting some of the elite schools from around the country, they had to join in. Eventually they all gave in to the demand for the game in their communities.

Because a third term season is so short, squeezed in between summer and winter, a tournament makes sense. Each team will play six games over the three days at St David’s, and they are full-length matches. Most of the schools will play three or four tournaments of this kind in the season and the upshot is that, far from a brief “after-thought” of a season, the 1^st football team will typically play more matches than the 1^st rugby team will.

It was a U19 tournament at first, U15 teams were added in 2009, and this year there are U14s and U16s too, playing at St Stithians. That makes it a massive undertaking. There are 32 teams at each venue and a total of 96 matches will be played at each over the three days. And it runs like a well-oiled machine. Brad Ireland, St David’s sport director is the organiser and right next to him all the time in Franco Gilardi, who has been involved since 2007. Between them, they have pretty much nailed the model, although they do tweak it a little every year. “We extended the U-19 games to 35 minutes a side this year, for example, and we are considering brining in rolling substitutions from next year, Ireland said.

It’s an undoubted success story, and it was St David’s that started it all. Football is growing as a school sport, in numbers and quality. If it were not for the vision on Shane Gaffney and the dedication of Brad Ireland, Franco Gilardi and the people who have kept the tournament going, it would never have happened.

The beautiful game kicks off this weekend. It’s been great watching it happen.

Saints double makes schools hockey history

 

My sporting highlight of the week? ………….

The St Stithians Girls College won the Pullen Cup tournament, the premier local girls hockey knockout competition, beating Noordheuwel in the final last Saturday.

The Pullen Cup is named after Rob Pullen, a former South African international player and national mens coach. He was director of sport at St Andrew’s Girls’ School when, in 2006, it was decided by the organisers of girls hockey that they needed the equivalent of the Aitken Cup – the long-standing boys hockey knockout tournament – as well as a junior competition similar to the U15 boys Boden Trophy. So, they introduced an U19 and an U16 tournament and named them after Rob Pullen and Ros Howell, who was the head of hockey at St Mary’s at the time and, like Pullen, a former national player and national senior team coach.

The interesting thing is that, this year, St Stithians won both U19 competitions. It’s the first time that’s happened. The Boys College won the Aitken Cup back in May when they beat Jeppe, in a one-on-one shootout after clawing their way back from 2-0 down to level matters with seconds remaining in normal time. It was my highlight of the week back then, and I remember noting that there can be fewer things in sport more dramatic than the eight-second contests between shooter and ‘keeper that are used as a tie-breaker in hockey these days.

The Pullen and Aitken tournaments have, in recent years been dominated by two schools. St Mary’s won the girls title eight times out of the 16 it has been played, and were the defending champions going into this year’s edition. Jeppe have won the Aitken Cup more times than anyone else and they had six consecutive titles under their belts when Saints stopped their run this year.

I’ve always found victories by the underdogs stirring so, while I know that long term winners don’t set up those records by chance – it’s usually because they work harder than anyone else – it’s great, as an outsider, to watch newcomers go into the contest with no respect for the history and a fierce determination to make their own. 

St Stithians did that this year, twice. It sets things up nicely for next year. Will those former champions bounce back, or are we seeing the start of a new dynasty? We are lucky to have schools so closely matched in Joburg schools sport. It’s what has kept me a keen follower of it for all these years.

Roll on 2024.

 

My sporting highlight - the Joburg derby

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? …. Easy, the Jeppe vs KES derby.

That’s not just because Jeppe won both the 1^st team games, although it was good to see that the rugby gods don’t keep an office at 44 St Patrick’s Road after all, seeing that KES snatched victory from the jaws of defeat three times in a row in the lead-up to this one.

No, it was a cracking game, played in front of a capacity crowd, with instances of individual brilliance from players on both sides and, backs-to-the-wall, bloody-minded defence from both teams when it was needed too.

There were mistakes, but the boys were under intense pressure in that cauldron, and the weight of expectation must have been massive on them. Yet they kept their cool. I never saw single incident of bad temper, even.

And, once again, the game was an advert for transformation. There were black players aplenty on the field and they were often breathtaking. Talent, obviously, knows no race, players at good schools, with the facilities, coaching and playing opportunities will develop into stars. That’s the model – no need for even thinking about quotas.

I watched the amount of planning and hard work put in by the people at Jeppe, over the last two weeks, to try to cope with a crowd that size, watching a game of that intensity. They succeeded, I think. The SuperSport Schools commentators were bandying numbers of 12 to 15 thousand about, but the estate manager at Jeppe, Laurie Stegmann, and I once calculated, block by block, how many people could fit in around the ground and we came up with eight to nine thousand. All of them were there on Saturday, plus at least another one or two thousand who never got near the field.

It was a special day, but both KES and Jeppe really cannot cope with the spectator expectations any more. Maybe it’s time to do what they do at the Paarl derby – the only one that’s bigger than this one, I’d say - and take the game to a stadium that has the seating, and parking, to handle the numbers.

Still, Saturday was one of those “I was there” occasions that will be long remembered by those who were.

The World Cup is around the corner and the refs have got me scared

 

I’m worried about how the World Cup is going to be refereed.

I obviously have no problem with the decision to put player safety first and, in principle, with the zero tolerance attitude to contact with the head.

Cards have been issued as never before in the last year, and that would be fine if there were a way to make them completely consistent in the same way that a forward pass, for example, always results in a scrum – although they are trying their best to stuff even that one up and after replays we get clear cases where the ball went forward being ruled OK these days.

But no, there still doesn’t seem to be uniformity in the application of the head contact area among the refs, just over a month out from the World Cup. In the yellow and red card-rich new world of rugby, the coaches and teams have, obviously, worked hard at learning how to play with a man down, so getting a player sent off doesn’t automatically result in defeat the way it did a few years ago, but it still gives a huge advantage to the opponents and there’s no doubt that some of the games played in France in September and October are going to be decided, in effect, by the referee red-carding a player.

So, they had better get it right! But they are not. We don’t know how the “bunker” system for TMOs is going to play out, but up until now, the television officials in big matches have played a big role in pointing out incidents that lead to cards. That’s what they are there for – but then they have to see everything. There are far too many keyboard warriors who post video clips of all the “high shots” that all four officials miss after just about every game, to make the contests fair. No-one likes a Monday morning quarterback, but sadly those guys are mostly right. Even when a player who was hit high makes a song and dance of it and gestures extravagantly, hoping to prompt the TMO into taking another look - like Faf de Klerk did against Australia - not every incident is pointed out to the referee.

That means, in effect that some forward passes will be blown up, and some won’t.

Andrew Brace will be one of the referees in France. After what happened on Saturday night, we should all be worried. He called the knockout blow on Grant Williams an “unavoidable rugby incident”. Maybe it was, but SuperSport replayed the CJ Stander – Pat Lambie incident after the game and the two cases are identical. Stander was red-carded, Juan Cruz Mallia wasn’t even penalised. If the same things are adjudicated differently, then the contests can never be fair.

We’ve been told that the fact of contact to the head is the thing that counts, intention, bad luck and even the actions of the player who was hit, don’t matter. Players are being sent off every week and in almost none of the cases are their actions intentional. The words “reckless” and “irresponsible” are sometimes used. Yet Brace condoned this incident because it was unavoidable and not reckless.

Rugby is a quick, dynamic game, referees are human, they make mistakes and they are sometimes unsighted, but now that World Rugby has created this mess they had better find a way to make it work fairly, despite all of that.

I don’t think they can – that’s why I’m worried about how the World Cup is going to be refereed.

A mixed bag of sporting highlights

My sporting highlight of the week? ….  Well, the Springboks, obviously. It was especially nice to have a scrumhalf who passed the ball and didn’t box kick it relentlessly. Which led to some great tries.

Then the rugby Youth Weeks. The Golden Lions romped home in the Academy Week, which wasn’t that surprising seeing that there were four or five players there who certainly should have been at the Craven Week instead. The Jeppe/KES midfield combination was great to watch and how those players were not considered good enough for the A team can only be attributed to one-eyed selection, I’m afraid. And in the end the two-school strategy followed didn’t work and the Craven side lost two out of their three matches.

It was nice to be at one of these weeks again. I went to every Craven Week, bar two, between 1988 and 2018, so I’d had enough by the time I retired and stopped going, but I enjoyed the week at Jeppe – especially since I didn’t have to hang around in the cold at the end of the day and bash out a newspaper report – the great games and incredible players just kept rolling on, for three days flat.

And on Saturday the SA Schools and SA Schools A teams were announced. They are dominated by Western Province, quite rightly – no-one comes close to them at this level. The release of the names came while the “main” game was in progress, which was rather bizarre timing. It confirmed what we all knew anyway – that these teams are selected almost entirely before the Craven Week begins. Certainly some of the choices made had little to do with performances at the tournament.

There were, for me, two highlights to that announcement: the appointment of Katleho Lynch as SA Schools head coach and of Jimmy Jimlongwe as manager of the A team. I’ve known both of them for a long time.

 Katleho is as committed and dedicated a rugby man as you will ever get. He is a student of the game who has written some quite brilliant opinion pieces on strategy and coaching. He is young and sometimes gets over-excited, but you get the idea that his players always come first. He is going to be a great of the game in time.

Jimmy is a servant of the game. I’ve seen him manage Free State rugby and cricket teams unselfishly at interprovincial weeks down the years. He was famous for a number of years for donning full Cheetahs playing kit and leading his team onto the field at the Craven Week. He is being rewarded for that sort of dedication now.

Above all, they are both good men, kind and courteous. They are what the adults involved in running sport for children should be like. They richly deserve all the honours that come their way.

My sporting highlight - WP (and SACS) hockey

 

My sporting highlight of the week? …. It’s interprovincial season, with the hockey IPTs played last week and the Craven Week coming up next. The U18 Academy Week is in Joburg so I get to go and watch, which will be a nice hour or two out in the winter sun and, for me, a bit of nostalgia.

Looking back on the U18 boys hockey tournament, you have to marvel at the performance of the Western Province team. They beat Southern Gauteng 3-1 in the A section final, the same scoreline as in the pool game between the two earlier on and they were, to my admittedly untrained eye, at a different level. That Southern Gauteng side had swept everyone they met aside, but they were comprehensively outplayed, both times.

WP were duly rewarded with seven representatives in the SA School side that was announced after the tournament. They also have two in the SA Schools B team and five in the U17 high performance squad, which is just about everyone in their squad. They also produced the goalkeeper, defender and striker of the tournament. You can’t get more dominant that.

Six of those seven SA Schools A team players are from SACS as are two in the B team. I don’t much believe in those schools rankings you see on the internet, but it’s clear that they all have it right this year when they rank SACS as the top boys hockey team in the land.

Southern Gauteng did have the consolation of having their captain, Jaydon Brooker make the SA Schools team, and be named player of the tournament. He was undoubtedly the standout individual player there. The Southerns B side won the B section and they will be back in the A section next year.

Roll on Monday and the rugby ….   

 

Picture: WP Boys Hockey Facebook

The Grant Khomo Week embarrassment

 

I wonder if SA Rugby is a little embarrassed that, on the day when some of the big shots from World Rugby were in town for the U20 Championships, their Strategic Transformation was exposed for what it is – the enforcement of a compulsory racial quota in the teams playing in its youth weeks that is about numbers and skin colours only, that has little to do with really transforming the game.

The fact that is was Western Province that fell foul of the regulations at the Grant Khomo Week and had their U16 team were pulled out of the prestigious “main game” because they did not have the required number players of colour in their match day squad, is the perfect illustration of how absurd it is to claim transformation success on the basis of having more black boys that white ones in junior elite teams.

The Western Cape is a region where rugby, rather than football, is the sport of choice at many rural and township schools. That’s been their strategic advantage ever since these quotas were introduced. Their pool of black players pool is so much bigger, and they can almost always pick their teams on merit without having to consider the quotas. Finding themselves in the situation they did this time was very unusual. If SA Rugby were really concerned with strategic transformation and not just ticking the race boxes on elite team sheets, they would have acknowledged that the Western Cape is one area where they don’t need to worry about demographics and they would have, under the circumstances, let the boys play the game they deserved to be in.

There is no real strategic transformation plan, however. That would involve real development at schools level. It would require duplicating the successes of the Western Cape around the country. Which would require patience, lots of selfless hard work by coaches, fields, facilities and money. It’s easier to just insist on 11 black faces in all the provincial team photos, without doing anything to help make that possible.

And if the provinces don’t obey, they stamp a heavy foot on them and take away the deserved glory from the players in the offending team – black and white.

World Rugby, under ‘Game Participation’ on its website, says the following:

“Rugby has always been described as a game for all shapes and sizes. As the game evolves, World Rugby accepts its responsibility to ensure that, as the pinnacles of the game achieved through elite performance are driven higher, the grass root foundations of the game are broadened and deepened.

“There is a strong symbiotic relationship between the development of the game and performance: without one, the other cannot reach its potential.”

SA Rugby want the elite side of the game to flourish, and they want it to be predominantly black - which is right, given the demographics of the country – but they aren’t doing the necessary development. Instead, they are manipulating selection. I’d be embarrassed, if I were them, that World Rugby was there to see that for themselves.