Banning poached rugby players from provincial trials won't work, I'm afraid

So the Western Province High Schools Rugby Association, I see, has taken a resolution aimed at stopping what it calls the poaching of players at its affiliated schools.

In essence, a player that has been found to be poached, following a complaint from the school he was at, and an investigation, will not be invited to the province’s trials for its U16 Grant Khomo or U18 Craven Week teams.

It’s not a bad idea, but I doubt that it will have much effect. The selection and management of the teams that go to SA Rugby’s Youth Weeks is the only area in which the provincial schools unions hold any sway, really, so I guess that has to be what they are looking at. Whether what they are proposing will be enough of a disincentive to make schools change their recruitment policies and practices is, however, dubious.

The biggest flaw is believing that possible provincial selection is the main attraction. It’s part of it, sure, and schools with a track record of providing players to provincial teams certainly use that in their sales pitches. But it’s based on the quaint notion that offers made are in the interests of the players. They are not. Victories for the school’s 1^st rugby team is the goal and everything is in service of that.

You can’t, in any event, guarantee that every bursary player will become a provincial player, and to promise that is dishonest.

The proposals are based on another misconception. A Craven Week cap is not what it used to be. The ever-increasing racial quotas in those teams have meant that fewer and fewer white players can be chosen and that, rightly or wrongly, has had consequences. Some players at the top rugby schools have different targets now. Success for the school team at the big interschool festivals – Easter, Noord-Suid, Wildeklawer – on national TV - is as prestigious these days. And recruitment deals by the Universities and the senior unions, including overseas clubs, take place there now – the Craven Week is too late.

So, it’s quite possible that a talented white player (any colour of player, actually) can be persuaded to change schools even if that will close the Craven Week door for him.

The practice of poaching, for the school, is about buying future victories. At the same time, for the player and his parents it’s about money. School and hostel fees, kit and equipment, medical care, pocket money, and other things, are what are offered. Followed by a good chance at a Varsity Cup or junior provincial contract. And, of course, they say he will be getting a better all-round education than he was getting at the school he came from. I don’t think the threat of not being picked for the Grant Khomo Week necessarily trumps all of that.

Then, they have put in the loophole that they had to – movements of learners for reasons not related to poaching are OK. They cite two examples: a genuine case of changing schools because of relocation to a new town (or suburb), and movements that are academically in the best interests of the learner. Granting a bursary to a boy from an economically disadvantaged family that will give him access to an undeniable better education would also have to be acceptable – and that’s the justification very frequently used.

So, while it’s a start, and a move in the right direction, the sanctions proposed in Cape Town are a bit of a dead seagull, I’m afraid.

I spent derby day watching 12-year-old girls playing hockey

 

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? ………… Well, not being at the KES vs Jeppe derby game for a change.

I see Jeppe won it by 12 points, after losing the 1^st leg by 10 back in April, which makes them narrow winners over the two games which sounds about right, given their respective seasons.

I decided I didn’t have the stomach to face the six hours of unrelenting struggle that is attending this particular fixture – they are basically jamming seven-odd thousand spectators into facilities designed for three of four thousand, and nothing good comes of that.

I was going to stay at home, but then I opened an invitation sent to me (I sometimes get invited to things by people who think I still work for a newspaper). It was to attend a primary schools girls hockey festival, marking the 145^th Anniversary of St Mary’s DSG in Pretoria.

Those 145 years caught my attention. They mean St Mary’s DSG was founded in 1879, that’s nine years before St Mary’s in Joburg - widely regarded as our oldest school - which I assumed was also the oldest school in Gauteng.

Those who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I had to find out what that was all about. OK, so I was going to Pretoria later on any way to watch the Test match on TV with friends, but I thought watching some 11 and 12-year-old girls playing hockey would be a nice change from the gladiatorial spectacle that is a KES vs Jeppe game.

So, I made the trip up the R21. I’m so glad I did. Apart from the fact that those children were playing on a field marked with white lines, and that they were busting a gut in the cause of their teams, the sporting action, and the day, could not have been more different, and it was glorious to see.

And I got to meet great people. Mrs Odelle Howard, the Executive Head of St Mary’s DSG addressed my curiosity about the school’s history and opened up the school building to show me some historic pictures and things – it has piqued my interest to dig deeper. Later, I met Melinda Vos, their Director of Sport. She’s got an educational take on sport in a school that they should bottle and send to some of the people that I’ve come across who are running sport in schools.

Meanwhile, the little girls were playing hockey. No scores were kept – they never even switched the electronic scoreboard on, and they were up for another game every 40 minutes or so, all three days long.

There were some over-excited parents, but that’s their job, I guess. Everyone was clearly having a great time.

I’m glad Jeppe won the derby game, but I’m not sorry that I wasn’t there to see it.

 

There's only one Province, Western Province - sometimes

 

Here’s an old hoary chestnut, and like most of the things I whinge and whine about in this space, it has to do with what some regard as acceptable once they have decided that victory is more important than principles in school sport.

It’s about the inclusion of three schools in Paarl, and one in Stellenbosch, in the Western Province union boundaries when it comes to rugby, while they are located in the Boland for every other activity.

It wasn’t me who started the conversation this time – I came across it in the chat following the announcement of the fixtures for the final day of the Craven Week in Krugersdorp. Initially, some expressed anger at the fact that Boland was not allocated a game on the A field on Saturday. A-field slots on the final day have traditionally been the only honour that the teams play for at the week, with the greatest accolade being the final game of the week. Boland won both their earlier games and played some beautiful running rugby (which is what it’s supposed to be about) but they were relegated to the B field, behind some teams that had lost, and some who played some pretty turgid rugby.

It didn’t take long for the thread to begin asking the usual questions.

I’ve confessed before that when looking at topics like these I go back to things I’d already written and I came across several pieces on this issue. For one of them, it seems, I did a bit of Google Mapping. Here’s what I found:

It’s 71km by road from Wynberg Boys’ High to Boland Landbou; 64km from there to Paarl; and 46km to Paul Roos Gimnasium in Stellenbosch.

I then looked at King Edward VII School, in central Johannesburg. From there it’s 54km to Affies in Pretoria; 34km to Monument. And 21km to Boksburg’s EG Jansen.

The point I was making was that the Lions province can cast a net considerably smaller than the one Western Province uses, and scoop up a number of top rugby schools to greatly improve its talent pool (Garsfontein would also be in it). The Craven Week team that could be selected from those schools collectively would also, very possibly, go five years and 15 games unbeaten at the Craven Week.

Not that it will ever happen, and neither should it. Instead, Western Province should start choosing from the schools within its region only, like they do for cricket, hockey, water polo, athletics etc.

I’ve never been able to find out how this situation came about. It’s always been that way, they say. There was one Craven Week - 2001 in Rustenburg - where it was decided that the Boland schools should play for Boland, and Western Province should be chosen from the Cape Town area, just like it is in every other sport. Derick Hougaard, who went to Boland Landbou, played for Boland that year and made the SA Schools side. So did Pieter Pienaar, who was at Paarl Gimnasium. Also in the team was Schalk Burger, and Hennie Daniller, who was in Grade 11 and played for Western Province the next year.

Western Province won all three games in Rustenburg, but they didn’t get into any of the late games on the A field on Saturday, and the next year the Paarl schools were back in the WP fold. I can’t find anyone who remembers why the decision was made to do the right thing in 2001, in fact, many were astounded to find out that it happened at all. But whatever principles were applied in deciding to go that way were abandoned when they realised that without a little help from their Boland friends, Western Province had to play on a level field, and they found it tough.

One interesting explanation that was given me is rooted in the old historical social and political alliances which saw the cream of Paarl society distance itself from those who live on the other side of the Berg River (translate that to the wealthy, white, landed class aligning itself with Cape Town rather than with the poorer, mainly so-called coloured, folk of lower Paarl). I haven't been able to find out if that was true.

The rationale for having Paul Roos Gimnasium in Cape Town for rugby is tied to the school’s close association with Stellenbosch University, which as one of the oldest clubs in the land, played in the Cape Town competitions from the earliest days.

This is actually not a good year to bring all of this up again. The composition of the Western Province and WP XV teams that went to the Craven Week was pretty balanced – of the 46 in all, 22 were from the four “Boland” schools. Rondebosch and Wynberg have had good years, and they contributed eight and six representatives, respectively

There were 17 players from the two WP sides in the two SA Schools squads announced and, of them, 10 came from those schools.

The role of school sport is educational. It’s about helping young people to become good adults. It’s also about developing players for higher levels of the game.

I would argue that that both those aims will still be well met if those Boland Schools are sent back to where they belong. Building a legacy and setting unbeaten records for Western Province should have nothing to do with it, but if they are going to brag, and if the media are going to extoll their virtues, the same rules must apply to all.

Craven Week number 31 for me

 

I said I wasn’t going to make the trek to Krugersdorp to watch the Craven Week this year, but I lied. It was the thought of sitting in the traffic for an hour each way that turned me off, but the FOMO got me in the end, and I drove out there on Tuesday.

I’m not sorry I did. I wanted to see for myself if what I, and others who, like me, have been around like me for while, suspected –  the Lions selectors have  stuffed it up again – and after watching them go down to the Bulls, I’m afraid it loooks like they have.

But mainly, I guess, I wanted to say that I was there in 2024. I didn’t go to the 1994 Craven Week in Newcastle, for some reason, but I was at the 2004 week in Nelspruit, and in Middelburg in 2014, and I was in Secunda in 1993 – so there’s three decades of attendance right there.

The first time I attended the week was actually in 1985, before I became a newspaper reporter. It was in Witbank, close enough for a hotheaded young coach to drive to, and there were a couple of my players from Highlands North Boys’ High in the, then, two Transvaal sides. So, the coach of one of the other English schools that had a representation and I, went there on all three days.

Then, in 1988, I was made the manager of the Transvaal XV that played in Port Elizabeth, and in 1989 I was the coach of the Transvaal A team that won the main game at Ellis Park – it was the Centenary of the Transvaal, now Lions, Union. The coaching appointments in those days were a bit of an emeritus position, rotated between members of the High Schools Committee.

It was in 1989 that I first got a job as a freelancer at The Star, and it was a reporter that I attended the 1990 week in Durban. I missed out in just three years after that, including 1994 in Newcastle, but I was at every other Craven Week until my last as a reporter in Paarl in 2018. Add in this year, and that makes 31 in all. I don’t know if that’s a proud or a pathetic record, but I’m pretty sure it’s unique, certainly there is no-one still going to the events who has been around as long as I have.

So, you can see why I decided to go to Monument on Tuesday after all. The Craven Week is, of course no longer anything like it  was through most of those years. When it was started by Piet Malan in 1964, endorsed by Dr Craven, it was a celebration of schoolboy rugby. Craven absolutely insisted the emphasis was on playing open, attractive rugby and that winning wasn’t the primary aim.

The “main” game was awarded to the two teams that played the “best” rugby. It wasn’t a “final” and I remember Dr Craven chewing out the SAPA reporter in the press box one year because the Citizen used that word in the headline to his article.

The advent of full TV coverage, of sponsors who call the tune and the “professionalisation” of the game changed all of that. It’s become a knockout tournament for the most successful unions now. Round one is quarterfinals, the four winners meet in round two and the last two standing play in the final on Saturday. And it’s officially called a final in the SA Rugby correspondence, and the winners are referred to as the champions.

All the fixtures for the final day used to be allocated on that basis of the best rugby played. Nowadays, it seems, they have become classification games ala knockout tournaments, and Boland, for example, who played great rugby by all accounts and won both their earlier games are relegated to the B field, simply because from the get-go they were never given an opportunity to play one of the big guns. Dr Craven would never have allowed it.

The best players from the schools in the Boland region are, of course, playing for Western Province, who have two teams at the Craven Week, and third at the U18 Academy Week – but that’s a different balls-up that no-one has the balls to address, I’m afraid

Back to those Lions selections. It’s a rugby truism that if your second team is highly competitive with your first (even to the point of besting them in training games) then you don’t have a very good second team, you’ve got a big selection problem!

That’s happened with the Lions for two years in a row. The Academy Week team is cleaning up in its competition again this year - they (pictured above) won the main game 45-25 against EP today - while the Craven Week team (with some exceptions obviously) again looks quite ordinary.

There are players in the B team who should have been in the A team. Simple as that!

 

I love the Craven week, but not the cold

 

I Googled it, the phrase “in the bleak midwinter” comes from a poem by Christina Rossetti, later set to music by Gustave Holst, and sung as a Christman Carol.

 The opening verse paints as good a word picture as any you’ll find: It’s enough to make you want to spend the day in bed, but then you remember that Midwinter’s Day – June 21 – is on Friday, and they are prediciting weather much like today (June 19): a bit nippy to start with, but with a short-sleeves 22 degree peak at 2pm.

Here's how it goes:

'In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.’ 

And three days later, on June 24, the Craven Week begins. I attended more Craven Weeks than most people – a colleague in the media once declared that I was at more them than anyone alive, although I’m quite sure that isn’t true – and while I miss those days awfully, I’m not that sad that I won’t be cold when I watch the games on my TV this year.

I remember the words of two of the great characters around the week in my early days, both long departed. Piet Kranouw reminded us as we were planning to travel one year that “two things are true – there’s no such thing as weak SE Transvaal (now Pumas) team, and that you never go to the Craven Week without a coat.” Then I remember the inimitable Zandberg Jansen speak of Bloemfontein’s “eiesoortige vrek koud” (unique deathly cold).

There are hordes of boys and girls and parents and officials in the City of Roses over the next two weeks for the SA Schools hockey IPTs, and I thought of them this morning when I turned on another panel on the gas heater.

The U18 Craven Week is at Monument this year, where it will probably be quite balmy, and I know the hospitality in Krugersdorp will be the customary country-town Craven Week warm, but I don’t know if I’ll be going there – the prospect of two hours in the traffic each day on Ontdekkers Road or Hendrick Potgieter (take your pick) is as bleak as that winter’s day that Rossetti so brilliantly describes.

Still, the Craven Week is one of the very best in the year, I will miss it.

Maybe uncover some new cases of abuse instead of rehashing the old ones?

I’ve watched the first two episodes of the School Ties series on M-Net and find myself wondering what the point of it is.

Child abuse, sexual and other, is entirely reprehensible and it must be rooted out by whatever means. The power that coaches and teachers have over the children in their care can be abused, and that is happening in schools, and sports clubs.

There have been enough cases in the media to show that this has happened in some of the so-called elite schools in this country and, clearly, schools have a duty to ensure that these things should never happen in their communities.

That’s non-debatable. But why, I wonder, is M-Net regurgitating cases from the not so recent past? Apart from anything else, it’s lazy journalism. The two episodes so far deal with the David McKenzie affair at St Andrew’s College and Collan Rex’s conviction of hundreds of cases at Parktown Boys’ High. Both of those were covered in the My Only Story podcast three years ago, and in the press. They were repeated in an edition of Carte Blanche earlier this year. Samantha Cowan wrote a book (her School Ties title has been appropriated for this series) and she features on camera in the Parktown episode, repeating her conclusions.

Episode two ended with a teaser indicating that the next story will be that of the tragic events at St John’s Prep School and College, which were also aired in that Carte Balance edition.

There’s no harm in retelling these stories and in analysing their significance, again and again - if they act as a cautionary tale and constantly sharpen awareness among children and their parents. I think it might have been more valuable, however, if the makers of this series had rather gone looking for other incidents (and the experts quoted intimate that these things are quite common in our schools).

The real problem, I feel, is that the schools involved are not being helped by the re-opening of these cases. There doesn’t seem to be much confidence in their ability to proceed down a different path, committed to being the sorts of places where these things cannot happen again. 

The statements by the schools are displayed, without comment, but I get the feeling that they are being perceived as empty promises. Whether those cases were rogue outliers or part of an established toxic system, as alleged by some of the experts, the schools now have a duty to carry on educating their learners in many complex ways. That’s difficult enough without being made to account again for matters closed some time ago, and without being left alone to carry on with the process of rebuilding and continuing to safeguard those in their care.

I also have a particular problem with something that was said at the end of the 1st episode. Deon Wiggett, the My Only Story man, fires a broadside at the sport of water polo and, in it, he repeats the statement he made in the last of those podcasts that Mark Evans, a teacher and polo coach at DSG in Grahamstown, had been accused of inappropriate behaviour by some of the girls he coached.

Evans was suspended by the school, pending a Disciplinary Enquiry. In January 2022 I got hold of a letter sent to the DSG community by the headmaster in which he details the process followed in the enquiry (a legally sound and exhaustive one) and announces that Evans was found not guilty of all the charges.

He quotes the findings of Advocate Ryno Eksteen, the independent chairman of the DE:

He was satisfied that the evidence presented did not support the conclusion that the teacher concerned had acted inappropriately or had failed to conform to DSG’s standards of conduct and the SACE Code of Conduct in his interaction with learners.

He specifically found no evidence of the teacher making undue physical contact with learners or intruding on their dignity in any manner (whether while coaching water polo or in the classroom).

In a letter to its parents, written after the airing of the School Ties programme, the school explains that while the investigation initiated by DSG was being conducted and the disciplinary enquiry concluded, the South African Council for Educators (SACE) was conducting its own investigation, which was concluded in March 2022. On 25 May 2022, DSG received the findings of the SACE Ethics Committee in a formal communication, which informed the school that an investigation into the allegations had been conducted, and the Council could not find sufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations. On 31 March 2022, the Ethics Committee deliberated on the matter and recommended that the file be closed pending new/tangible information. 

As a result of those findings Evans was reinstated as a teacher. Is repeating the allegations, despite the exoneration, permissible? Surely it can’t be left there?

I assume M-Net is getting the viewership numbers it is hoping for with this production. I wonder where they will be going to after St John’s. Will they then do their jobs as investigative journalists and uncover a new case? And will they leave the schools already affected alone to carry out the duty of care that we all demand of them? 

    

Full on commitment, with smiles on faces

 

Just when the immovable weight of win-at-all costs schoolboy rugby was getting me down, I was given a breath of fresh air on Wednesday night, and a reminder of the value of organised activity for school kids; of the willingness of children to work extremely hard if it’s at something they love doing; and of the skill, dedication and passion that adults (teachers and others) have for setting up learning experiences for those children.

And it came in, for me, a strange place, an area I know very little of – music. Jeppe are hosting a cultural festival this week – an attempt to give their non-sporting stars a taste of what the rugby and other sports team get when they are invited to the various interschool gatherings every year.

Wednesday night was a music festival and I was roped in to go along and take pictures. There were seven schools there – choirs, marimbas and bands – and it was just amazing. I was a reluctant audience member at first but I came away awed.

Clearly you don’t get to be as good as those singers and players are without hours and hours of practice (probably more than the sportsmen put in), and it made (to my uneducated ear, anyway) for some top class performances from everyone.

What really struck me, though, was that everyone – on stage and off – seemed to be having the time of their lives. They performed with joy when they were up there, and they were on their feet and invested when they were in the audience. And there was whole-hearted appreciation and acclaim from everyone for everyone else.

I sat surrounded by them and experienced the amazing way in which they sang their own words, in perfect harmony, along with what was being played onstage. It was the magic of musicians jamming along that I’ve read about but never really seen.

And during interval there was an impromptu massed choir involving just about everyone, outside the hall singing, beautifully, a song that they somehow all knew the words of.

I know there are interschool competitions in some of these activities, Wednesday wasn’t one, yet I saw commitment and passion equal to what you see at 1^st team rugby matches, and it all happened with wide, white-toothed smiles on faces, everywhere.

It’s unfair to single any one act out, but if I ever get the chance to watch the Parktown Boys’ High School brass band again, or the Greenside High School choir, I’m grabbing it.

These players are no good - let's buy some new ones

 

There’s been a bit of chatter recently about an old, unoriginal issue – recruitment of schoolboy rugby players.

I read everything that Alan Miles publishes on his blog - https://coachtalk.wordpress.com - he eloquently expresses views on school sport that I whole heartedly agree with.

His most recent piece, titled Integrity-driven success in schoolboy rugby dives into the pretty much ubiquitous (among the top rugby schools anyway) area of recruitment. He’s talking about the practice of attracting players to your school on bursaries, who would otherwise not have come there on their own.

While there may be good reasons to give a boy an opportunity when, for financial reasons, he would never have gone to a certain school, his ability to help your 1st team win matches shouldn’t be one of them.

Miles goes on to list a number of things that are wrong with pursuing success by following that route. The pressure on the player who knows he is only there to win games for the school; the obscene sums of money spent on recruitment, and how it could be used to develop all the players in the school; the absence of old-fashioned teacher-coaches in the system; the instilling of dreams of post-school glory in the minds of those players, knowing full well that very few of them will make it to the professional level.

I was tempted to throw my two cents in after reading that, but resisted, mainly because it makes me look like an old fogey who tells the same stories over and over. But then I was sent a link to a voice clip originating, it seems, from an Old Boys/Supporters WhatsApp group discussing what needs to be done following yet another defeat for their school’s 1^st team.

After listening to it, I was reminded of the title of Alan Mile’s piece – Integrity-driven success in schoolboy rugby – and it occurred to me that you could use what’s being proposed as an example what integrity-driven success definitely is not!

I’m not going to put the link up. It’s the sort of thing that gets around, so I’m sure many of you have heard it already. I’m not going to be the one who spreads these sorts of things, and it’s not an original story - the exact conversation takes place in many schools these days. I’d wager.

I’ll tell you briefly what was said, and what is wrong with it.

In essence, the speaker informs us that the coaches have gone as far as they can go with the 1^st team – these players will never be good enough to beat their rivals, so it’s time to give up on them and go shopping for replacements. What a thing to say in an educational context. The coaches aren’t teachers, they’re ex-players (a Google search told me that). An educator who declares that a child in his care cannot be developed any further and so he is abandoning him, should surely be dismissed, on the spot.

It gets worse. Not only is this lot not good enough, the speaker believes, but we cannot trust the future generation of players at the school, and the system in place, to ever produce a winning team again. So, it’s time to introduce a proper rugby programme at the school, starting from Under-14. And what he means by that is that they need to bring in 10 to 15 players per year, on bursaries from now on. And it should start now – there’s a professional scout, he says, who has identified five Grade 11 players who can be brought on board straight away, to salvage the rest of the season and build for next year.

He has had contact with old boys who are willing to help with that, and he will co-ordinate it.

Then he invokes the “Lance Armstrong” rationalisation – our rival schools are doing it, so we have to do it too. And to hell with the ethics and educational values!

As my friend who sent me the clip says: “The plot has genuinely been lost. How awful to play a sport under these conditions.”

 

The biggest derby was bigger than ever this year

 

Someone told me at the Jeppe vs KES game on Saturday that he was looking forward to reading my blog on the nature of proper derby games, and how this one met the requirements.

I realised that I’m a bit predictable  – I looked in my laptop folders and I found I’ve written the same thing three times before. Not that the KES Jeppe derby doesn’t fit the bill: near neighbours, longstanding fierce rivalry, massive spectator interest etc.

Instead, I’d like to reflect on the day itself. It was remarkable. That’s got to have been the biggest crowd at this match ever.  It’s an occasion that has always attracted the most spectators at a school game in this part of the country, but this year was at a different level.

There are no ticket sales, and therefore no official numbers, but we did do a pretty careful guestimate two years ago and came to around 7 000. The seating capacity was increased by about 1 200 for this year and there were people on hillsides and far away places craning to see. So, while it was nowhere near the 20 000 that some estimated on social media, I’d put it at between nine and 10 thousand.

And, apart from some unsatisfactory behaviour by a few Jeppe old boys – more on that later – there wasn’t an incident that I heard of. That’s due to the healthy relationship between the schools, and it hasn’t always been that way, but also to an extraordinary amount of thought and planning that went into staging the day. Those temporary stands (brought in at considerable cost) are part of that. There have been meetings going back to last year, culminating in a seven-page long running order for the day.

And all of that so that 40-odd schoolboys can play a 70-minute game. The pressure on them was enormous and the way they handled it was incredible. Anyone who points out an error made by one of them in that cauldron as something significant, is just crazy.

KES won by 10 points in the end, and they were good value for it. Jeppe threw everything at them and they stood firm, and struck back with precision. I’ve seen their victory described as an upset, probably based on Jeppe’s win over Grey College. That victory was an outlier, however. I along with many others I’m sure, knew it was going to be close, with KES probably having the edge. The Reds came into the season with a vital “spine” in place – last year’s SA Schools hooker is still there, as is the 2023 Craven Week eighthman (wasn’t he good on Saturday?) and the flyhalf, and no-one outside of Krugersdorp knows why he didn’t go the the Craven Week last year, is still there, controlling the game with his intelligent (and long) kicking.

Against that, Jeppe had some big and powerful forwards and backs that are full of flair. KES were up to stopping those forward drives, and they weren’t fooled by the trickery in the backs. They did that enough times to end up the winners. It made for a great contest.

As for those pesky old boys. Again, no surprises. Misbehaviour by them is universal, it’s happened at this particular game before, sure, but don’t believe you don’t get some of it at St Patrick’s road too. I generally sit on the dead-ball line by the medical centre there - it’s a good spot to take pictures - and you don’t only get polite applause and shouts of “go school” from the old boys sitting in that corner. Ask anyone who was in that area at the Bishops game over Easter.

I’ve seen some real old boy misbehaviour in my 40 years of going to school rugby matches, and it usually happens at local derbies. I’ve seen running battles that have had to be stopped by the cops, I’ve seen pitch invasions, and after one derby between the English and Afrikaans schools in a small town, the fighting was so bad that there was a snap debate in parliament to discuss it. And we’ve all seen the YouTube clips of players and officials getting assaulted by spectators.

That there was never any fear or possibility that those sorts of things could happen at this game, shows the quality of the schools involved.

The behaviour of some Jeppe old boys was never-the-less unacceptable, no question. It's one of those things that is impossible to control by the host school, however. At least the Jeppe headmaster tried - he didn't turn a blind eye,  I've seen that happen too.

So, while condemning those happenings let's also celebrate the spirit on the day as a whole. And congratulate the players for the way they handled the situation. And applaud the Reds' victory, and look forward to seeing it all  again on the 20th of July.

People are making some good points about school rugby

 

Let’s face it, when you agree with what’s being written, it’s damn fine writing.

With that in mind, there’s been some pretty good stuff being put up recently about the state the state of school rugby.

There was Gregg van Molendorff’s piece about Greg Wilmot likening the professionalisation of school sport to a runaway freight train; then Alan Miles (who doesn’t write nearly as often as he should) spoke about the effects of the pressure being put on schoolboy rugby players; and today I read an excellent piece on what’s wrong with allowing massive winning scores to mount up – on the NextGenXV website.

They are all issues that I’ve been on about for years now. The problem is that they have been getting worse, not better.

Take the matter of teams being allowed to post huge winning margins. The NextGenXV story was about Grey College beating Outeniqua 92-3 last weekend. That was a 1^st team game with players who are prepared like professional athletes. So much of what I’m going to say might not apply to them. My real concern is about uneven contests in the lower age grades, and the damage that they cause.

I had a whine about this one last year after Potch Gimnasium lost 83-3 to Paarl Gimnasium. In that post I mentioned that I had written on the topic in 2017, 2018, 2022 and them, in 2023. It’s 20024 now and here we go again.

Here’s an extract from that 2018 piece. It’s a bit over the top, but I must have been angry:

You’ll remember that last year a team that won 221-0 posed for a picture in front of those numbers on the scoreboard and the photo was posted on the school’s Twitter and Facebook sites, to great acclaim. I commented at the time that it was as sickening as those pictures that you see of so-called hunters posing over the carcasses of slain lions or elephants that had been chained to stakes. I have the same nausea again today, and it’s an appropriate comparison, because rugby players who are willing to turn out for the lower teams in the junior age groups are rapidly becoming an endangered species and we should be doing all we can to conserve them, just like we should be looking after those magnificent wild animals.

 

I shared the NextGenXV piece and I got the expected opposition from some quarters. Those who object to lop-sided matches being called of early, generally have two reasons: they believe it’s wrong to deprive the winning team, who have worked hard, and maybe spent a lot of money to be there, of a full game; or they point out that there are lessons to be learnt in taking a good hiding and that there is no “50-point maximum” rule in life.

 

I’m not going to repeat the points made about the physical, emotional and psychological damage that a 100-point loss can have on a teenager. And, yes, I know that you can’t blame a superior team if their opponents give up. The problem starts with allowing the mismatch in the first place.

 

Instead, I’ll quote myself again:

 

My view is that anything that happens at a school has to be educationally accountable, and there’s nothing educational about allowing scores in rugby matches to reach those numbers. Education is about learning things that help children grow and develop into good adults, and that’s as much about building character, kindness and humility as it is about building strength, acquiring skills and accumulating knowledge.

 

Allowing a team of children to be humiliated, discouraged and possibly injured, during a rugby game, while at the same time allowing the other team to bully them, to gloat, and to assume an air of superiority, is not educationally accountable, and that applies to both teams.

 

As for the point about going to so much trouble and expense for possibly just one half of a rugby game, the educational value goes way beyond the one-hour match situation. There are teaching and learning opportunities at training, on the bus trip, on the side of the field, and if the game is called off early, well there are all sorts of lessons there too.

It’s true that you can’t call off the game if things aren’t going your way in real life. And it is our job as educators (and school rugby coaches are educators first), to prepare young people for that. But is subjecting children to pain and trauma the best way of doing that? Isn’t that a bit like the story of the father who tells his kid to jump – “don’t worry, I’ll catch you” – then lets him fall on his face. Telling him, “that will teach you never to trust anyone!”

There have to be more humane, caring ways to teach the lessons of courage, resilience, handling misfortune etc, than sending the hapless E team out to take 100 points from the Superstar School across town, and then have the winners post a gloating picture on Facebook.

 

School rugby can really become a runaway train, if you let it

 

There’ve been murmurs, as there often are when the pressure and fatigue of an unrelenting school rugby season begin to bite, about how the superb system we appear to have going – the one that’s the envy of the other rugby playing countries – is maybe not as shiny and clean as it should perhaps be. Especially seeing that sport at school is actually not an extra-curricular programme, as it’s often referred to, but in fact it is – and there’s no debate here – firmly at the centre of what should be taught and learnt in schools.

Gregg van Molendorff, deputy headmaster at Graeme College, has written a piece in which he recalls that, five years ago, he warned that the culture in schools regarding winning and losing was leading to undesirable behaviours, on and off the sports fields. Sadly, we are in more trouble five years later than we were back then, he concludes.

He quotes a paper written by Grahamstown sports psychologist, Greg Wilmot - https://wilmotpsychology.co.za/navigating-the-professionalisation-of-school-sport-in-south-africa - , who calls the professionalisation of sport at schools a “runaway freight train” – out of control and gaining speed and momentum all the time as it proceeds.

Between the two of them, Van Molendorff and Wilmot produce a list of all the things going wrong in school sport, ascribing them in the main to a culture which measures the value of a school by the results of its elite sports teams, and the lengths to which schools are prepared to go to keep those teams winning.

The actions of coaches, parents and players in response to the resultant pressures are at the heart of what’s going wrong.

Wilmot points out that there has not been much research into the effects this has on schoolboy players and that many of the stories we hear are just that – unsubstantiated anecdotes. He even quotes me as one of the storytellers. although the column he refers to:

https://www.iol.co.za/sport/opinion/professionalism-in-school-sport-not-always-bad-1990101

is actually more about the greater player safety that a professional approach has brought than about what's going wrong (I did, however, tell a number of horror stories in that regard over the years).

They may not be research-backed, but the abuses that inevitably arise when winning matches is the dominant value ascribed to, are well known. And we have all known about them for some time.

I’ll spare myself the trouble of summarising the lists of the two educationists above and give you mine. It’s the same as theirs, and I know it by heart. The points are chapter headings in my book (and I will publish it one day).

I actually preface that bit by speaking about what I call “The Lance Armstrong Excuse”. I got the idea from the famous Armstrong interview with Oprah Winfrey. In it, he told her that he didn’t believe he was cheating by doping during his seven Tour de France victories because everyone else was doping too. He was justified in breaking the rules, he said, because he wasn’t getting an advantage.

Those sitting in judgement of him didn’t fall for that, neither did most other fair-minded people, I’d hope – including the very educators who now feel they can indulge in the practices below because every one else is. “You’ll never be competitive if you don’t,” is the refrain.

So, they pressure rugby players into specialising at an early age; they subject them to exercise intensity and workloads that have been shown to be inappropriate for their ages; they go out shopping for players to fill gaps in their planning; they turn a blind eye to rapid changes in body size and shape that could not happen without chemical assistance, etc.

And when things go wrong, they blame the players themselves, or their parents, or the body builders in the local gym. They speak of “unforeseen consequences” when they know exactly what could happen.

Runaway freight trains, we see in the movies, are impossible to stop once they get going. You have to remove some of the load back at the start of the journey, then you need good brakes, and a driver who keeps the whole thing under control.

The harm done to young men if you don’t do that, Wilmot points out, is real and lasting. You don’t need research to see that.

Two things that make our schools rugby great

 

I was invited during the week to a briefing to mark the launch of the 2024 SDC Noordvaal Cup tournament. I went along because I saw that Swys de Bruin would be part of a panel discussion and was interested to hear what he had to say and because I knew I’d see some old friends there.

Swys said all the right things about reducing the pressure on schoolboy rugby players and getting them to play for the enjoyment of the game, although I fear he was preaching to the wrong congregation – in my experience this competition, and its forbears, epitomises the importance of winning like nothing else I’ve seen.

The tournament was called, several times, the biggest in South Africa and, possibly the biggest in the world. In my days as a reporter, I learnt never to say things like that. Whenever I did, I would be called out pretty smartly to be told of something else that was older, or bigger, or whatever.

I don’t know what they mean by “biggest”. If its about the highest number of schools, and teams, playing in a single, unified competition over a number of weeks culminating in day in which the finals of all four divisions are played under the same banner, it might well be that there is nothing quite like it anywhere else.

If you are measuring big by the number of matches and players involved, however, I’ve argued in the past that there’s nothing to match a Saturday morning in the non-league, “friendly”, schools rugby season. Take this weekend, and the independent schools are on holiday, remember. There will be 21 rugby matches at Jeppe, where Westville Boys’ High are the visitors; Pretoria Boys’ High are travelling to Maritzburg College with 25 rugby teams; and there will be 27 games at Parktown, where KES are the visitors, over Friday and Saturday.

That Parktown fixture is interesting. KES have way more teams that they do, so Springs’ Boys High are also involved and the sides are matched up so that every KES team gets a game on the day. Last Saturday Rand Park filled in simiarly at Jeppe vs St Stithians, and later in the season Northcliff will help out in Jeppe’s games against St John’s.

That’s 74 games at three venues this weekend. On a full match day in the Noordvaal competition, there will be 17 fixtures and assuming that each school fields eight teams (which definitely won’t happen in the lower divisions) that adds up to 136 games. When the private schools get back, and if you add in the fixtures at the smaller Joburg schools, and at those in Durban, Cape Town and the Eastern Cape, you will see that the numbers don’t compare.

That’s not to say that the Noordvaal Cup is not a great tournament. It provides regular competition to 37 schools and their games are played in conditions that meet professional standards. And there's no doubt that the highly competitive nature of the competition, and the pressure that involves, makes for the development of very good players. Those are the sorts of things that people are talking about when they say our schools rugby system in the best in the world.

And side by side with that, we have this huge mass participation, non-league setup that, by the way, is largely demographically transformed.

I’m excited about this weekend’s Jeppe vs Westville exchange – it will involve over 1000 boys in all sorts of codes and activities – and I can’t wait, too, for April 20 when the Noordvaal Cup kicks off with Helpmekaar vs Monument, a pretty tasty matchup to get things rolling.

40 years later, and the Easter festivals are as good as they have ever been

 

The schools rugby festivals have been part of Easter in this town since 1984. The Saints Festival would have been celebrating its 40th anniversary this year if it weren’t for Covid, St John’s have had their 25^th  birthday and this year is the 20^th KES festival.

Those who came up with the idea in the beginning could never have imagined they would have the longevity they have had and that, all these years later, when the world would be such a different place, we could have a day like Saturday.

I was at King Edwards in the afternoon, and at St John’s earlier and I don’t recall seeing crowds bigger than those. I meant to go to Saints too, but I was worried that I’d never find parking back at KES for the Jeppe game, which I (and half of Joburg, it turned out) wanted to see. I’m told there was a massive crowd there too.

The founders of that original Saints Festival who first had the vison have, sadly, all passed on now. Colin Hall, who was later to become a giant in the South African business world, was the head of the parents association back then, he died earlier this year; Mark Henning the headmaster in 1984, died in 2021; and Tim Clifford, the rugby coach who came up with the concept, passed on a year later.

I’ve been around these festivals for most of the 40 years and seen something of their inner workings. They have become big commercial undertakings, and fund-raising enterprises for the schools that run them. But the educational principles articulated in the beginning are strictly adhered to.

I’ve spent the last few festivals at KES, where they give me a place to sit in the tournament office and I leave at the end of each one newly amazed at the level of commitment and the sheer hard work put in by so many, mainly volunteers to make it all work. I’ve been a spectator to the same activities at the other two festivals, so I know the same things are going on there too – they could never run the way they do if they weren’t.

And on Saturday those dedicated workers were rewarded with the smooth running of big, big days in three different places. 40 years later the Easter festivals, amazingly are bigger than ever, and as good as they have ever been.

 

It's Easter rugby festival time, and I'm looking forward to things staying the same again

 

Sport, these days, is entertainment and the laws of rugby, in particular, are continuously being tweaked to make the game more appealing to spectators, and to TV audiences.

And schoolboy rugby, I’d argue, is the most entertaining form of the game – the numbers that turn up at school fields around the country every Saturday bear that out. And now you can see most school games on TV too, thanks to SupersportSchools.

There’s usually no room to spare at the big interschool derby games, and there won’t be again this weekend at the Easter Rugby Festivals. There are three in Joburg – at St Stithians, St John’s and King Eward VII School – at a couple of others in other places.

The Standard Bank KES Festival is the youngest of the three Highveld events, and it’s the 20^th staging of it this year (it would have been the 22nd is it were not for Covid). The first Saints Festival was in 1984, and St John’s started theirs in 1996.

They are a long-term success story and while there have been some changes to them down the years, they have remained the same in principle, based in their hearts on educational values.

I dug out one of the earliest programmes from the St Stithians Festival and those values were articulated in it:

“The idea is to invite like-minded schools that share a values-driven ethos and have a healthy attitude to sport. It is a festival of rugby with no overall winner, no tournament team and no man of the match awards. The idea was to match schools who don’t normally meet during the season, and as far as possible, there will be no derby games and no repeat fixtures from year to year.”

That’s still how it is. I’ve been fortunate to spend the weekend at the KES Festival for the last few years, and I’ll be there again this year. I was in the office there this week to pick up accreditation tags and I heard those sorts of things spoken out aloud by the organisers. The values are never deeply buried, despite the intense busyness that’s there in the leadup to the event. It’s exactly the same at St John’s and St Stithians, I’d wager.

What goes on between the lines on the field, Adi Norris, the director of the St John’s Festival once told me, has to remain exactly the same for the players, year after year, and the hype and commerciality that surrounds the event must never be allowed to interfere with that.

That’s exactly right. I know that’s what’s going to happen at KES this year – for the 20^th time – and I’m looking forward to it.

KES have assembled an impressive lineup of schools to mark their anniversary. They will only play two games each this year. That’s a change, but a necessary one in the interests of the safety of the players, given the incredible concentration of fixtures at this time of the year and the number of games they are expected to play in a short period.

The 12 schools that played in the first KES festival in 2002 were: King Edward VII, Jeppe High School for Boys, Parktown Boys’ High School, Queens College, Paarl Gimnasium, Durban High School, Affies, Pretoria Boys High, Rondebosch Boys’ High, SACS, Selborne College, Wynberg Boys’ High.

Of those, KES, Jeppe, Parktown, Queens and Pretoria Boys High are back.

Fixtures

Saturday

8am Hudson Park vs Queens
9.15am Northwood vs Brandwag
10.30am Bishops vs Dale
11.45am Ben Vorster vs Eldoraigne
1pm Pretoria Boys High vs Selborne
2.15pm Queens vs Jeppe
3.30pm KES vs Paarl Boys’ High

 

Monday
8am Ben Vorster vs Queens
9.15am Paarl Boys’ High vs Pretoria Boys High
10.30am Northwood vs Hudson Park
11.45am Eldoraigne vs Selborne
1pm Dale vs Parktown
2.15pm Jeppe vs Brandwag
3.3pm KES vs Bishops

I'm not a fan of the language-use in Chasing the Sun

 

I took some flak in the comments section when I said, last time, that the use of the F-word in the Chasing the Sun documentary was way over the top.

I watched the first episode of the second series last night and if anything, the language is even worse.

I’m an educator at heart, one who believes rugby can play an important role in the school curriculum because of the lessons that can be taught through it.

There are skills and techniques that can be learnt and the players become fit, strong young men, but the lessons learnt are really about values. Just like young people acquire facts and figures, and techniques in their years at school, but what we really want them to learn is to become good people. “Good sons, good fathers, good husbands” is a refrain that comes up at boys-only schools quite often.

And I’ve always thought the right kind values can be taught through rugby. People have different ideas about what those are, but courage, commitment, discipline and reliability are certainly some of them. So are some “softer” issues, the ones that define decent behaviour – sportsmanship, honesty, teamwork, courtesy, gratitude etc. Rugby is a game that develops character, good people get the success they deserve. Terms that have become cliched, perhaps, but those are things we tell ourselves, and the players.

The story of the Springboks and their successive World Cup victories is a fantastic one, and the way Chasing the Sun celebrates how certain players have overcome their dire circumstances is deeply moving. The team has mastered what it takes to be winners at that level.

They are the embodiment of many of the values the game teaches, and Rassie Erasmus is an expert at harnessing all of that in the cause of victory. It’s inspirational and if I were a coach I’d want my players to watch the series, and I’d be looking for quotes and anecdotes to use in my coaching, and teaching.

Excessive repetition of the same profanities is, however in my view, a sign of lazy language use. That’s a lesson that teachers who want to produce good people should be teaching, and using the most foul expressions imaginable, all the time, is surely not helping in instilling the values of decency that we claim the game teaches.

Swear on Rassie and the boys – I’m told it happens in every team and dressing room at that level – I’m close to my dotage now, I know, but I find it offensive and, worse, not the example I’d want school players to follow.

Here comes the flak …..

Under 14 is not too soon to go on tour

I remember a time when schools wouldn’t let their youngest teams – U13 then, U14 now – go away on sports tours. The feeling was that touring was a privilege reserved for the 1^st team, something the others should aspire to.

The little ones, it was believed, should concentrate on learning how to play the game (s) first, and that was best done without exposing them to the pressure of playing games at out of town schools. I agreed with that thinking then – part of me still does – do 12 and 13 year-olds really have to be playing on a national stage before they have got the basics down?

But, those were different days, I concede. Sport at the schools that take it seriously is way better organised now, the level of coaching is on a whole new level and the stakes, at 1^st team level, are higher than they have ever been. Anyone will tell you that the degree of success you achieve at senior level is directly related to the quality of your junior programme.

So, U14s began playing across the country too, on a limited scale at first, increasing year by year until we have what took place at Jeppe this weekend past: U14 basketball and water polo festivals so big that they needed three and four days to complete them, involving just about all of the like-minded schools around the country. It was the 25^th year of the U14 Ken Short Water Polo Festival – with the Covid interruptions; while the U14 Basketball Festival has been going for eight.

I was at Jeppe for all of those four days and I came away realising that we weren’t completely right all those years ago and that festivals like these can be a very effective tool in teaching players just starting out what the games they have chosen are all about, on and off the field.

Probably the most important thing, though, is that the two Jeppe events are festivals, not tournaments. They used to be tournaments, with knockout round and finals, and tournament teams used to be chosen, until the headmasters of the schools who play in them agreed that all of that be stopped and that they be played as festivals in which, while the results of matches should matter to the teams involved, they have no greater significance than that.

I’ve taken some flak in this space for condemning an early-season under-14 polo tournament held at a local school where there was a winner, and for speaking out against the SA Schools tournament where they now go down to U12 level – 11, 12 and 13 year-olds playing fully competitive interprovincial sport! Those are things that have no place in educational sport.

And that’s what it is and has to be – educational. There’s where the benefits of playing in a more non-competitive atmosphere kick in. Basketball and water polo are similar games in a number of ways, one of which is that they have biggish game-day squads, but relatively small numbers of players on the field at any one time. At this level, you are unlikely to have a full squad of players who are on the same level, skills-wise, so the temptation, when the result is vital, will be to keep your best players in the game while the rest of the squad warms the bench. That’s flat out not allowed at the Jeppe festivals, and the coaches buy in to it. How are the weaker players going to improve if they don’t get game time? That’s the educational value of a festival.

Then there are the number of matches played in a short space of time. The players get to try out what the coaches tell them, almost straight away. Not that there aren’t gaps between games. That’s when the boys get to hang out together. I spotted them sitting in the shade of the trees and in the marquees at Jeppe throughout the weekend, talking trash and roughnecking – being boys, in an age when doing that is somehow frowned on. Multiday events like these create those opportunities and it’s there that team spirit is built; friendships are cemented and socialisation lessons are learnt – the things that turn those U14 teams into good 1^st teams in four years’ time.

And I haven’t even mentioned the interaction between the coaches and the massive efforts put in by a horde of officials and volunteers to make the two events run smoothly and finish dead on time despite losing all of Saturday afternoon due to the inevitable Highveld thunderstorm.

So, while I do sometimes miss the innocence of a more amateur time in school sport, I saw enough at Jeppe last weekend to convince me that, the way they went about it, they have got it right and that U14 is not too soon to tour.

A perfect way to end the season

 My sporting highlight of the week? ...... I came across this from one of the Jeppe parents:

Jeppe and St David's 3rd cricket teams met on Saturday. The game's not so deadly serious at those schools, at that level, and this was their last match of the season - and ever, for the matrics who were playing.
Jeppe, batting second, were cruising and need six runs to win, with a bit of a trundler bowling and the facing batsman shaping to knock it out of the park (who wouldn't want to, under the circumstances). Then he was approached by the St David's captain who asked him not to. He intended giving one of the matrics in the team the next over. It would be the last time he bowls for the school, he said.
The next ball was a dolly, but the batsman blocked it. The matric got to bowl his over and Jeppe reached the target soon afterwards, but cricket, and the spirit of sport, won the game. Marvellous!

My sporting highlights of the week - the guts of Dricus du Plessis and the efforts made by teachers to hit the ground running.

 

My sporting highlight of the week?

Well, it has to be Dricus du Plessis, I guess. I, like many others, am suddenly a UFC fan although I have to confess that I know absolutely nothing about the sport – I actually was a bit alarmed at what the fighters are allowed to do – but there’s no denying the nation-building effect of these isolated world championship victories. And, I think that if any coach wants to show his players what he means when he tells them to show some old-fashioned determination when things aren’t going to plan, he could do worse that play them a clip of those last two rounds – the guts that Dricus showed was remarkable.

It was the first weekend of school sport and despite the fact that they only went back last Wednesday, there was plenty of action. I was at the water polo at St John’s on Saturday. There were five games in two days for the 1^st teams, to get them back into the swing of things, in their new indoor aquatic centre. It was my first time there and it’s a world-class facility. The trouble and expense that some schools in this country go to so that children can play sport is quite amazing.

On Sunday I was at cricket at Jeppe – there were matches at many schools on Saturday – but this one, against Potchefstroom Volkskool is traditionally on a Sunday, for some reason. Two Jeppe teams made the trip to Potch and two from there came across to Joburg. Once again, the effort that the school teachers go to to let the children play sport amazed me – it’s my year-opening highlight, every year.

The Springboks ruined the narrative, and they don't like that up North

 

Warren Gatland’s utterings on how the game of rugby should be changed to save it have got quite a response.

His suggestions aren’t all bad – the return of a 5m scrum when an attacking player is held up over the tryline, for example, I agree with – but, along with many others, I believe that his thinking is largely founded on bitterness and frustration. The domination, once again, of the Southern Hemisphere teams and the success of the Erasmus/Nienaber deep-thought approach to tactics and their canniness in gaining an edge by using the laws of the game in a way that the others haven’t thought of, wasn’t what was planned for.

There’s an analysis of his suggestions on the Planet Rugby website that unpacks just how he hopes to take away that edge https://www.planetrugby.com/news/warren-gatland-thinks-up-two-radical-ideas-which-would-take-away-the-springboks-tactical-weapons

I have to concede that sometimes I go a little ‘conspiracy theory’ around the edges, especially when it comes to World Rugby and their bias against South Africa – a fact borne out by too many examples to be simply dismissed as victimhood or sour grapes.

I’m not going to get into all of that now, but Gatland’s theories, and the widespread acceptance that they seem to have gained, brings me back to the view that there is a narrative - supported by World Rugby - that the wheel has turned and that the power now lies in the Northern Hemisphere, that the best players are there, that Ireland and France are the best teams and that one of them was a shoo-in to win the 2023 World Cup.

It was already apparent three years earlier, with the 2021 British and Irish Lions tour. World Rugby has stated that they regard the Lions Tour as second only to the World Cup when it comes to promoting the game world-wide. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the audience numbers bear it out. The problem though, is that in hyping it, a narrative was created. The Lions are an almost mystical amalgamation of four nations, four national teams who rise every four years to take on the best of New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. and part of the plan is that they should beat them, of course

Any sporting contest, however, belongs to both teams on the field. The circumstances must be such that they have an equal chance of success. Sure, the home team will have the advantage of a noisy crowd on their side, but that apart, everyone involved in the staging of the game has a duty to ensure its fairness.

The hype around the Lions wasn’t really in line with that – the home nation hardly featured in it. You got the impression that they were only there to be the losing team. There was no home advantage for South Africa in 2021 because of Covid, of course, although you could argue it was already gone in 2009 when the spending power of the British pound meant that there were more Lions fans at the games than local ones.

By 2021 the story had developed into a Northern vs Southern Hemisphere confrontation, with little doubt about which side the international body was on.

The 2021 Springboks were fresh from the World Cup triumph and the accusations and criticisms alleging that they had somehow cheated and didn’t deserve to win it were flying around. The same ones that were to return even more hysterically in 2023.

So, the 2021 narrative went, the fabulous B&I Lions were going to put the record straight against a Springbok side that might have won the cup, but certainly didn’t play good rugby. They were brutes, who dominated physically and bent the substitution laws to suit their style.

Rassie Erasmus alluded to these things in the video he produced after the 1^st Test in 2021. He mentioned that the narrative went that the Springboks were thugs, playing negative rugby and he had asked for them to be judged on what they did on the field, not on those perceptions. He also asked for equal respect, for the players and, especially, the captain to be treated in the same way as their opponents.

That he felt they didn’t get that is history now and his infamous video critique went public thanks, apparently, to the referee himself. It led to Erasmus’ ban from the game, of course. I will never know or understand what he was trying to achieve, but I’m pretty sure Erasmus’ actions were brave acts of sacrifice, aimed at derailing the prevailing narrative.

Had he followed the process and waited for a reply via official referee review channels things would have turned out very differently. Nick Berry wasn’t a cheat, but his refereeing certainly confirmed what was being said – that Springbok side could never beat the Lions legally by playing their kind of rugby. The second Test would most likely have gone the same way and the Northern Hemisphere will have taken its rightful place on the world rugby throne.

That didn’t happen of course, but the story didn’t end there. There was again a sense that South Africa’s victory wasn’t real because it wasn’t fair.

With that in mind, we set out on the road to the 2023 World Cup. Ireland and France were dominating their opponents. Ireland beat the All Backs on tour and France scraped home against the Boks in Paris after Du Toit was red-carded for being pushed into contact and the communication between the referee and the TMO mysteriously failed before he could review the winning try, which came after a clear double movement.

No matter – we aren’t whining about referees here – the upshot was that Ireland and France were designated the “best teams on Earth” by the Six Nations media and SA and NZ were declared no-hopers for the World Cup. Everyone up north, World Rugby included, agreed with that and the narrative was taken up again – the Northern Hemisphere’s time has come and everyone else might as well not turn up.

The 2023 Six Nations tournament was widely touted by the commentators as the “best rugby tournament on the planet” and some of French and Irish players were being called the best rugby players in the world. Super Rugby, the Rugby Championship and the World Cup-winning players that were coming to France from New Zealand and South Africa later in the year were discounted. And the fact that the All Blacks and Springboks had shown that they know how to win the World Cup, three times each, didn’t count for much either.

I wrote this, back in May 2023: “The team that wins the World Cup will win seven games in a row in September and October. What happened in February and March counts for nothing at all.” OK, so the Boks did lose to Ireland in the pool games, as they did against New Zealand in 2019, but you get my point. It’s not an original story, it’s what Naas meant when he said the Currie Cup isn’t won in May. What surprises me is that there are rugby experts who don’t seem to know that.

So, having three Southern Hemisphere sides in the semifinals in 2023, with Ireland not getting past the quarters again and the hosts getting dumped out on their home field, wasn’t part of the plan. Neither was the way the final panned out.

Once again, the response was to declare the Springbok win illegitimate. The behaviour of the crowds, and the abuse of referees was taken to a new level. Yes, we also complain when we lose, but after that, no-one can ever point it out to us again.

World Rugby’s response, at their awards evening, was to pretend that none of it had happened and to reward the Northern teams as if they had taken the story to its desired conclusion and come up trumps anyway. 

The ungracious behaviour goes on and on. Warren Gatland’s plan is just a continuation of that.