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.