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.