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.