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.