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.