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.