It's different, but the Craven Week is still the best tournament of them all

 

I know I whine a bit about the way in which the Craven Week has become, in effect, a knockout tournament, far removed from the festival of rugby it used to be – played according to the values laid down by Dr Danie Craven himself, which expressly forbade any notion of a “winner of the week.”

The week has  become the logical outcome of the professionalisation of rugby at school level – and that has meant many of the “old ways” have been left behind.

That saddens me, especially when there are lines crossed, ethical and educational, in pursuit of victory, but it is still the greatest tournament at school level, anywhere that the game is played.

I’m going to be glued to the TV next week. And, even though I said I won’t be going through, I won’t be surprised if I end up getting into my car, or bumming a lift from someone, and taking the two-hour trip up the N4 to Middelburg on one of the days, any way.

Being selected for a provincial team has always been the ultimate dream of any schoolboy player and, although the quotas imposed on teams, has blurred the lines, I think it still is. I’ve had my say on the imposition of minimum numbers in the teams and other than saying yes - transformation is absolutely necessary, and no – it’s not being handled fairly or effectively, I’ll leave it at that.

There are 16 teams at the Craven Week, and 20 at the Academy Week and only five or six have a realistic chance of ever making the main game. For the rest of the teams not much has changed, I guess. Those boys are closing off their school rugby careers – or rugby at any level, for many of them – with something special, getting to know new team mates, and soaking up the unique experience.

And off the field there will still be those who like me have been going to the week for years, pretending to have a keen eye for emerging talent and taking down names that we are going to be hearing again in the years to come.

I know the big festivals like Noord-Suid and Wildeklawer, together with SuperSport Schools, have reduced the mystique, and much of the cream of schoolboy rugby is already well-known to us by the time Craven Week comes around.

But those events are notoriously pale in complexion. The good thing about the quota system is that the provinces have been forced to dig deep to find black boys who can play at this level, and there are schools who are developing them in numbers.

There will be gems unearthed in Middelburg next week.

It’s not quite the same anymore, but there is still nothing like the Craven Week. And every game will be on TV – that’s how special it is.

And FNB are the new sponsors. That's great news. They pioneered serious financial involvement in school rugby with their Classic Clashes, and the Easter Festivals back in the day. I have good memories of the days when I used to cover those events. I'm hoping they do what good sponsors do - pay up, back off and let the boys take centre stage. Do that and your brand will soar.

My sporting highlight of the weekend - it's Saints again

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? ….. Amazingly, it’s St Stithians related for the third week in a row. Lhuan-Dre Pretorius’ 153 runs, on debut, for the senior mens side against Zimbabwe.

He never matriculated at Saints – he left at the beginning of grade 12 to go into home schooling – but he was there from grades 8 to 11 and was already in the SA U9 team by then. He is a cricket wizard. I remember him as a schoolboy scoring runs as effortlessly as he did on Saturday; he kept wicket for the Central Gauteng Lions at his last Khaya Majola Week; and I watched him bowling left-arm spin once – and taking lots of wickets for very few runs.

I like, sometimes, when a new bright star appears on the horizon, to recall him or her playing as a schoolkid and wonder if we saw what was coming. Lhuan-Dre was a no-brainer.

Another ex-Saints boy announced himself on Saturday – Asenathi Ntlabakanye. He certainly made an impression as a schoolboy rugby player, I remember writing of his astonishing ability to play all 70 minutes of a game and finish as one of the strongest players on the field, despite his bulk. I never pegged him as a future Springbok back then, however, because he just didn’t fit the body mould. But we never imagined Rassie Erasmus and his ability to pick the right players, and his re-invention of the game. Seeing Asenathi in the first two scrums against the Barbarians was a sight to remember.

I was once taken to task for referring to St Stithians as our top cricketing nursery. It was pointed out to me that a school closer to the centre of town had actually won most of the games in their fixture that year. I do believe, however, that a measure of success for a school sports programme is the number of players who kick on and play at a higher level after school.

Consider that Ryan Rickleton and Kagiso Rabada have been rested for the current Test series, but there are still three Saints old boys in the team: Wiaan Mulder, Pretorius and Kwena Maphaka!

Pink Derby day means more

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? …. I did enjoy watching the Pumas beat the self-proclaimed wonders of the rugby world on Friday night, but at the risk of looking like I’m on the St Stithians payroll, it has to be the Pink Derby on Saturday.

I have to disclose that I got a personal invitation from the ebullient Annie Fyfe-Hitchings to go to Saints to watch the game, and that I confirmed for myself that you’d battle to find better food for the guests in the clubhouse than what they lay on there.

It was the 8^th staging of the Pink Derby – a collaboration between St Stithians and St John’s, promoting awareness of, and raising funds for, the scourge of breast cancer. I was at the 1^st one, I think – at St John’s – and the concept has really taken off since then. It was a production on Saturday of the type that Saints is well-known for, and it the house was packed.

St Stithians vs St John’s is a proper rugby derby – between close neighbouring schools who are alike in just about every way. Except for an important one – St John’s is the 2^nd oldest school in town; St Stithians was founded in 1953. It’s old school tradition vs the upstarts. That has added some spice to the contest, on the stands anyway, down the years.

On the day however it’s us, this year vs them, this year, and on paper St Stithians were heavily favoured. They duly won, but only after St John’s mounted a stirring second half comeback to turn a 22-0 halftime score into a one-point deficit. The hosts’ only second half points came from a last minute penalty to make the game safe.

It was a thriller, well worth the trip for me. And afterwards, while quaffing the great snacks up in the pavilion, I got to have a catch up with a number of old friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen for years. I’d hoped that would happen. In truth, that’s why I went there in the first place.

It was a great occasion, and a good game, on a day that meant more.

Two significant schools rugby games, and a pretty good innings, this weekend

Picture: Kearsney College Facebook

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? ….

Aiden Markram, obviously, and the Jacques Nienaber defence. But closer to home – thanks to the magic that is SuperSport Schools – two remarkable schools rugby matches on Saturday, at Kearsney and at Kingswood College, where St Stithians and St Andrew’s were the guests.

They were both nail-biters, both won with the final move of the game by the team that was behind. Actually the Kearsney game was restarted after they took the lead, once the ref had cleared the field of spectators, but they managed the kick off, and that was that.

Kearsney beat St Stithians 26-25 after Saints had been ahead for all of the game. It was gutting for the Joburg team but, for me, it was a fantastic achievement by them. Saints have had their best season in a while. They are sitting on 60% wins and their losses – to Parktown, St Alban’s, Pretoria Boys High and, now, Kearsney have all been close.

I, and others who believe in the importance of school rugby as part of the education of the young people in our community, have been worried about St Stithians. They stopped playing KES and Jeppe a few years ago now – quite understandably – and in the case of quite a few other schools who did that, the next step has been that they cease to exist as a competitive force playing at a decent level.

Clearly there are people at St Stithians who refuse to allow that to happen. Their teams are being well coached, the club is being well led and the boys have responded in the way you’d expect boys at a school with a proud tradition to do.

A win on Saturday would have been a fine way to make the point. It didn’t happen, but for me it was heart-warming on a cold day none-the-less.

The other game I watched was the K Day derby – Kingswood vs St Andrew’s in Makhanda. I’ve been to most of the significant interschool matches down the years, but I’ve never been to that one. Thanks to SuperSport School, I was able to get a taste of it. I’ve been told that K Day rivals the Paarl derby in the way it divides a town in two and that, if either of the schools had the seating capacity, the crowd at it would not be much smaller.

The two TV commentators were associated with the respective schools in some way, so they had real knowledge about the players, and the occasion. They were eloquent and interesting. It really made you feel you were there, a little bit.

The result went my way, I confess. I spent some time at St Andrew’s for the Khaya Majola Week a few years ago and the people there are just so nice. I’ve also not got over my disapproval of Kingswood after reading that Makhanda’s other school, Graeme College, had broken off all ties with them when they lured some of their talented players away with bursaries and promises.

You know how I feel about that.

 

Provincial schools selections - a complicated matter

 

The Golden Lions schools rugby teams that will be going to SA Rugby’s Youth Weeks in the holidays have been announced.

There are 115 players in the five teams chosen – U18 Craven Week, U18 Academy Week, U17 Welpies, U6 Grant Khomo Week and U16 Welpies – and 90 of them come from five schools. Noordheuwel has the most with 22, there are 19 each from KES and Jeppe, 17 from Helpmekaar and 13 from Monument.

The other 25 players come from a further seven schools, with Parktown (seven) and Marais Viljoen (four) providing the most.

There’s nothing very unusual about that distribution, although Monument usually dominates the selections and hasn’t done so this year. That’s going to raise some eyebrows, as are the high numbers coming through from KES and Jeppe.

In the Craven Week team, there are seven players from Helpmekaar, six each from Jeppe and Noordheuwel, three from KES and one from Monumnet.

KES, at 1^st team level, beat both Noordheuwel and Helpmekaar this year; Jeppe lost to Noordheuwel and to Monument. The relative representation from those schools in the Craven Week team doesn’t reflect that. Not that it should, necessarily - we know there can be great players in weak teams – but the reality is that the racial quota requirements in place go in the favour of the schools with higher numbers of quality black players in their teams. Noordheuwel had two players of colour in their ranks when they played Jeppe earlier this season, Helpmekaar had none against KES last week. KES and Jeppe, and Parktown, have a majority of players of colour in their teams and, although those teams haven’t been too consistent this year, they have produced results indicating that those boys can play.

In case you are wondering just how the quota system affects selection, here’s an explanation given to me by a Craven Week coach a few years ago (at the time that the requirement of 11 black players was increased to 12 – more than 50% of the team):

Every 23-man squad, at all the Youth Weeks, has to have at least 12 players of colour in its ranks. By the end of the second round of fixtures, every player must have played a full game, with everyone getting a chance to start a match.

Those arrangements aren’t there simply to give everyone a game. They are designed to prevent the coaches from taking a “first choice XV and group of reserves” approach. The reasons are obvious. There’s a perception that some provinces will pick their 12 reserves and use them only as replacements while the 11 first choice boys will play all the time.

There's a veiled accusation of racism in that, probably justified in some cases. It has, however, changed the dynamics of team selection and match day lineups drastically.

Eight of the first day’s starting lineup have to sit out the second game, which means that you have to, in effect, chose two separate teams.

You pair players, the coach explained – when A sits out, he will be replaced by B, hopefully without weakening the team, and so on. That changes things. You no longer pick the best 23 overall; your selection has to take the “two team” reality into consideration.

In rugby, everywhere else in the world, you select your bench to cover positions in case of injury, or to provide impact late in the game. Not at SA Rugby’s Youth Weeks. There the coaches are not allowed to make tactical substitutions in the first game, and in the second outing only the seven players who played on day one can be substituted, unless there are injuries.

Given the way rugby has developed around the world, we are asking our Craven Week coaches to manage a different game to that which has evolved, world-wide, in recent years.

That’s the reality behind the numbers. The schools that have embraced transformation and are developing black players in numbers will have the most representatives. Star players of colour recruited by others will be there too.

Once that exercise is completed the selectors can look at the white players and try to find a balance that will give the team the best chance of success. It hasn’t been an objectively fair process for a long time and it’s unlikely that it ever will be again.

That’s why the festivals involving all the players from the elite schools, like Noord-Suid and Wildeklawer have gained in popularity, and relevance.

I’ll be rooting for the Golden Lions at the Craven Week. I hope they’ve got the selections right this time. It will make a nice change if they have.

Jeppe scrapped, but Affies rugby is on a different planet

 

My school sport highlight of the weekend?

It has to be Jeppe vs Affies. You can’t but be awed by the quality and effectiveness of the Affies sporting programme. 

Jeppe won the 1^st team hockey game quite handily on Saturday, but this is an exceptional Jeppe team. I know their hockey people were nervous going into the day. They scraped a draw at 1^st team level in Pretoria last year on a day when they lost more matches than they won, and this year Jeppe lost five and drew one of the 15 games – there haven’t been many schools that have done that to them this year.

Affies rugby is on a different planet. They won every game on Saturday, as they did at KES last weekend, and against Jeppe the last three years in row. Their strength in depth is quite amazing. The lower age group games were played on a stagger, Jeppe Cs vs Affies Ds or Es, for example, yet the Jeppe teams were still all beaten comprehensively.

Their available talent is dazzling – there are players in their Cs and Ds that will walk into the A teams at most schools. And they are well coached. They do the basics well, don’t make mistakes and stick to the game plan with total discipline. None of that happens without good coaching, and hours of practice.

Clearly, they do that at Affies and they deserve the results they get.

That said, Jeppe have shown before, that you shouldn’t underestimate a scrapper with a point to prove. Their 1^st team has played some big names this year and those teams came away knowing they had been in a game. We were expecting more of the same, and they sure delivered.

In fact, they came within a whisker of delivering another Grey College-sized upset. Affies slotted a penalty deep into extra time to clinch a two-point win. Jeppe tackled like demons, stopped the much-celebrated Affies maul, more than once, and scored a couple of scintillating tries.

The Affies team must have been shocked. It didn’t go according to the pre-game plan, or as the rest of the day would have suggested. Yet they were as determined not to lose as Jeppe was to win, and at the end their kicker showed enormous nerve to kick the penalty to win it.

There was no fairytale ending, but it was a fabulous game. Watching that, and seeing for myself throughout the day what they mean when people say the secret to SA rugby’s success lies in its great rugby schools, was the highest of highlights for me.

Ascension Day - a big schools rugby weekend that's gone now

 

Thursday was Ascension Day – a day of religious significance that was a public holiday in the past but was removed from the calendar at some stage when the number of holidays was reduced.

From a school sport point of view it was an important holiday because it always fell on a Thursday, which made for a long weekend during the second term and a good time to play out of town schools.

KES and Jeppe used to play against Northlands and Durban High School on that weekend alternating between Durban and Joburg. I was the fixtures secretary on the Transvaal Schools committee those days and I remember that there was a standing instruction that KES and Jeppe had to play each other before Ascension Day because they used to share a bus down to Durban and the trip would have been tricky had they not yet met.

At some stage a similar two-school arrangement was started up between Joburg and Durban co-ed schools on that weekend. There were eventually 10 schools from each province involved and it became a festival, sponsored by FNB, and played at a central venue. I was at the newspaper by then and used to report on it. It was quite a big deal. Girls hockey and netball were also played.

The Jeppe and KES double-headers fell away when Northwood (after the merger between Northlands and Beachwood) became too weak.

I’m not sure when the co-ed festival was dropped and I wonder what became of those schools. I think you’d battle to find 20 co-ed schools who play rugby at a decent level between the two cities nowadays.

I’ve been trying to remember who those co-ed schools were, and while some of the Joburg schools – Northcliff, Fourways, Rand Park for example – still play good rugby, others like Sandown, Sandringham and Hyde Park have pretty much fallen by the wayside. I imagine it’s pretty much the same in KZN. I wonder if schools like New Forest, Queensborough, Grosvener and Port Shepstone still play the game at all.

It is, of course, the other side of the professional approach to school sport coin. The top schools in the two cities draw all the talent, often stripping those sorts of schools of the odd good player who might emerge at them. They have little regard for the wasteland that they are creating and justify their actions in the name of rugby excellence and the development of future professional players.

In the meantime, the educational experiences that those boys got out of those weekends have disappeared and the foundations underpinning the game have become narrower.

Happy Ascension Day.

 

Some weekend highlights - big wins, narrow wins, and games where wins don't matter.

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend?

It’s hard sometimes, with so much going on, to get that warm and fuzzy feeling about just one thing, so please forgive me for listing a few.

Firstly there were two very meaningful one-point rugby victories.

KES beat Noordheuwel 23-22. While there has been some schadenfreude around our top rugby school having a rare bad year, I’m delighted that they got one back, and against a top school too. There is grit and resilience aplenty in that team, and they have a great captain. Things just haven’t been going their way, but they did on Saturday, good for them.

Later on, just down Joe Slovo Drive, the Lions beat the Ospreys 29-28. It hasn’t been a good year for them but they’ve stuck to their style of attacking rugby, often to their detriment. At least they got some reward for it on Saturday. I’m a tragic Transvaal/Lions fan – have been all my life – so any win’s a highlight for me.

I was at St John’s on Saturday where Jeppe’s 1^st rugby team beat a St John’s side seemingly more concerned with keeping the score down than scoring themselves. Not many highlights there, but up on the top field early in the morning I watched for a while a rugby game between two teams of the tiniest of tots. There were no posts and no scoreboard, the coaches were on the field, teaching, and the kids were smiling. It was great antidote for the dreariness that was to follow.

The big highlight of the weekend, though, has to be Jeppe’s victories in the Aitken and Boden Trophies. They also won the U16 Top 10 tournament earlier, and their U14s have yet to lose a game. I spend a bit of time around the hockey section there and, for me, the secret of their success is the classic formula:  talented players, good coaching, top-class facilities and a challenging fixture list. Added to that there is support from sponsors; a parent body (they call it the Hockey Patrons Association) that is right behind the boys; and a great family feel.

And orchestrating it all is Bryan Hillock, their indefatigable director of hockey, who instils a steely discipline and is always reminding everyone that “this means more”.

All of that is why they are so good. Their recruitment is good too, sure, but that’s not the only reason why no-one can touch them at the moment – as I heard from some disgruntled spectators at the finals on Sunday.

Putting your list of top 18 year-olds on TV is just not right

 I’m showing my age a little here.

When I first started going to the Craven Week in the 1990s Dr Danie Craven used to be there. He was getting on in years, and running South African Rugby, so he never spent the whole week, but he’d be around for a day or two, and he would speak at the SA Rugby-hosted dinner on one of the nights.

He had a cruel tongue in those speeches, I recall, and he’d use it when he disapproved of what he saw. There was a certain prescience in the things he mainly complained about – he could see his vision of what the week should be – a values-based festival of rugby with no winners and losers, and no individual honours – being replaced with the full-on tournament that it has since become.

I remember Doc at the 1991 week in East London. At that time there was a pundit working for SABC TV by the name of Zandberg Jansen. He was a wonderfully eccentric old man with a colourful use of Afrikaans idiomatic language. He would analyse the Currie Cup games of the previous weekend, and draw up what he called a “barometer” – a ranking of the players. Those were the isolation days, remember, so rugby fans were drawn to that sort of thing. It was good watching and I tried not to miss it.

Anyway, that year they sent him to the Craven Week and he set about creating a barometer of the players there. I was covering the week as a freelancer for The Star, but I was still a teacher then, and on the Transvaal Schools committee, so I was in on things and it soon became clear that the officials at the week, all teachers in those days, many of whom had been there for a while and were steeped in the spirit and traditions of the week, didn’t approve.

They felt it was wrong to be singling out players and were concerned that making Jansen’s list would be seen as a prize to aim for, putting unhealthy pressure on the 18 year-old players and distracting them from the real reasons why they were there. And what about the players who don’t make the list?

Some games were televised in those days, but SABC didn’t own the week the way DSTV does now, so the talk around the midmorning coffee and milk tart table was that Jansen should be told to bugger off. They were contemplating how to do that when Doc Craven arrived. He’d seen the show the night before and you can guess how that all ended.

No barometers at the Craven Week for the next 33 years. But is that about to change?

I love SuperSport Schools. They have taken school sport to a whole new level, giving players a platform to show their stuff, and bringing the games from around the country to those like me who love watching them.

They’ve gone into punditry too now with weekly magazine shows, and guess what? Zandberg’s barometer is back. I enjoy the programmes and I admire the pundits, but this week they published a pecking order of players in hockey, and I don’t approve. In the rugby show individual players have also been named, praised and discussed at length.

They have indicated that this will be regular feature with names added to and subtracted from the lists, I assume. And I know they are going to be at the inter-provincials in the winter.

A lot has changed since the days when Doc Craven used to pop in at his week, I know. What hasn’t changed is the fact that these are 17- and 18-year-olds, and that education is about building character. I just don’t think that rating and ranking them on national television is doing much for that. Do they really need that sort of pressure, on top of everything else that goes with playing in a must-win team environment, in their matric year, just when they are starting to become adult men and women?

Doc Craven knew they don’t all those years ago. So do I, but then, I guess I’m showing my age a little.

School rugby programmes have to be run by the community

 

Allan Miles’ excellent blog piece on the only two choices in school rugby programmes – go pro and become an academy, or remain a school with all that implies: - https://coachtalk.wordpress.com/2025/04/22/the-real-cost-of-the-schoolboy-rugby-dream/ - set me off again.

I went through some old stuff, looking for something I wrote a while ago about the downside of outsourcing part of the educational process, which I remember equating to a community opting out of its responsibility to raise its children.

I found the blog and was thinking of doing a little bit of cut and paste plagiarism. After reading it, though, I think it can stand with republication in full (with the odd bit left out). It was written back in 2020, nothing’s changed since then, really. Here it is.

American author Peter Block is an authority on the power of the community and he advocates for communities to take responsibility for the raising of their children. He argues that our children aren’t raised by communities anymore. Instead, we pay outsiders to raise our children – teachers, counsellors, coaches, youth workers, nutritionists, doctors etc.

We also pay service providers to treat and comfort the ill, for our safety and to take care of the elderly: all things, according to Block, that were taken care of in the community once. In the process we fall prey to smart marketing and advertising and we are manipulated into wanting things by those who are making money from the system.

Modern schooling is part of that. People chase after success and achievement and are prepared to pay for it, sometimes very dearly. It’s apparent everywhere in education, including sport. Few will argue with the principle that school sport is part of the educational process and, therefore, part of raising a child. I would argue that a school is part of its community and through its sporting programme the school, together with the community it serves, has a responsibility to guide children on their path to responsible adulthood.

A school cannot abdicate that responsibility, neither can it outsource it. You can bring in coaches and conditioning experts and buy the best equipment. You can professionalise your rugby programme, and that will bring positive results, and that’s fine. But if paid-for elements of the consumer system take control of the process you are heading for disaster, and the road to hell, in this case, is paved with the good intentions of the new media that praises to the heavens the professionalisation of sport at school level and calls for more and more of it.

A professional programme will produce excellent young players and some of them will go on to become professionals. Only a fraction will make it, though, and at some stage you have to question the amount of money spent on them and wonder about the rest of the players in the school. As a school community, you have a responsibility to raise all your children, not just the stars.

In any organised game the whole point is to win. You’d be wasting everyone’s time, and it would be an insult to your opponents if you went into competition without trying to be victorious. Teachers and coaches wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t prepare their teams with the goal of winning games in mind.

The question of course is how far you are prepared to go. Winning matches is certainly the aim, but do you make winning your dominant value? Honourable men, remember, are prepared to die for their values. That’s ridiculous, of course, but when you make winning the value by which you live, then you have no choice but to do everything you can to win. You have to win at all costs.

Schools are educational institutions, nothing else. Rugby at school level is part of the educational process and it falls under the principal. It doesn’t matter if there’s a trust that’s funding bursaries, or if the old boys are paying the salary of the coach, the principal is in charge and takes responsibility for everything that involves the school.

And the principal is expected to make education the priority. That’s not optional, it’s his or her job. Every decision has to be educationally accountable – is the action taken in the best interests of the learners? There’s no room for debate in that. It’s educationally sound to insist that all boys sent out onto the rugby field are well-taught, well-conditioned and have the necessary skills. The principal can demand from the coaches that the teams are motivated and have a desire to win. But the principal cannot demand victory and if his side loses despite all of the above being done properly, then he should accept it and promote the lessons that come with it. But when winning becomes the dominant value, educational considerations are often abandoned, along with the spirit of the game. 

More skilful, better-conditioned players are obviously a good thing and if a school’s high quality rugby programme sets a player on the path to a professional career, then that school has done its job in terms of vocational preparation and it has reason to be proud. Achieving these things requires a professional approach and as long as that approach is educationally accountable, every step of the way, then you cannot fault it.

It isn’t always, however. Often the professional, rugby academy way of doing things is described as putting the player and his holistic education first, but you don’t have to dig too deep to discover that the real objective is producing players who can help the school’s teams win matches. It’s part of the win at all costs outlook and some principals, I’m afraid, aren’t always entirely honest about it. They will speak about educational values but are quite happy to allow all sorts of things to happen, as long as their teams keep winning.

When the school commoditises sport provision and pays money to people from outside of the community to run its rugby programmes it is usually doing so because it feels it has to win. The school’s value is tied to the performance of its 1^st rugby team, so winning becomes all important.

The raising of the children by the community has been taken over by the professionals and because it’s a case of win at any cost, the costs, financial and in educational principles are not important.

There are all sorts of mean-spirited, unethical, and downright illegal practices that follow, all in the name of winning. Scorched Earth recruitment practices, early specialisation, over-training and substance abuse are only some of those.

If we were really committed to educational values in school sport we should hand the raising of the children back to the community, with the school playing a central role in that, and send the professionals to the professional game where they belong.

The KES vs Northwood game was abandoned. Who won? Who cares?

 

Old fart alert. It’s me again with my (some say) antiquated ideas about school sport and the role of winning and losing when children are playing games that are part of their educational journey.

 

I know, it was back in the latter half of the last century when I last coached a team, but I do remember that the idea of playing a game is to win it, that it’s the job of those put in charge to prepare the players as best they can, and that the players need to produce maximum effort in the cause of victory.

 

That’s the educational value of the exercise, and if it’s all done properly then the result of the game, while it will cause both great joy and awful sorrow for a while, really doesn’t matter.

 

I’ve gone down this route again after being at the KES Easter Festival when the game between the hosts and Northwood on Monday was called off, seven minutes into the second half. Northwood were 12-7 ahead at that stage, having led 12-0 at half time. KES scored shortly after the break and it was looking like they were about to launch a stirring comeback.

 

Then lightning in the area set the warning siren off and, immediately, the game was stopped and everyone was instructed to find cover. It was a pity that we were robbed of what might have been a great spectacle, but that was that. I went into the festival office in the cricket museum where I’d been working all weekend and eaves dropped on the radio conversations and heard, half an hour later, that the game was off.

 

The sun was out by then and the all-clear sounded minutes later but, I understood, Northwood still had a bus trip back to Durban ahead of them and it’s school on Tuesday, so resuming the game was not really on. That’s an educational decision and it was spot on.

 

It’s a ‘no result’ I heard someone say and that’s right, I thought.

 

Then, on Tuesday morning, I awoke to see on social media that the contest was reported as a win for Northwood, along with a debate on whether that was right or wrong. SupersportSchools published it on their Facebook page, which is pretty official, but then again they’d had their graphic artist prepare the results template with the badges of the schools on it ahead of time and they were always going to use it.

 

I’ve already said that results don’t matter, so who cares if people want to declare a winner under the circumstances? There was talk in the comment threads on Facebook about what constitutes a game, or not, and excerpts of regulations of various competitions were quoted. Someone said the referee declared it a result, which was weird, and wrong, because the referee – more than anyone else in the world – is not supposed to care about who wins or loses the game. If no-one wins, that’s the perfect outcome for him, come to think of it.

 

In my opinion, this was an easy one. It’s a festival remember. That’s the one type of competition when everyone should agree with me – the results count for nothing at all. You want to win, of course, but the games are put on for the sake of playing them only.

So, you don’t have to bother yourself with whether there was a winner or a loser. Northwood were brilliant in the first half, and KES were right back in the game when it was called off – that should be enough. 

It was for an old fart like me.  

Redemption for The Reds on Day1 of their Easter Festival

 

If you scripted a scenario for game in which the King Edward Reds laid the ghost of Stellenbosch to rest, once and for all, you could not have done a better job than what actually transpired in the final game of the opening day of the 21^st Standard Bank KES Easter Festival in Houghton on Saturday.

They put an end to their run of defeats with a 20-17 win over Rondebosch, and they did it at home, in front of a capacity crowd. Rondebosch came to Joburg unbeaten, with some big scalps on their belt and people are expecting them to finish right near the top of the rankings this year.

They may still do that – it certainly looked that way when they went straight on the attack from the kickoff and scored a try in the opening minute. What happened next must have surprised them, however. They came up against the most bloody-minded and courageous defensive effort that you are likely to see in a long time, with wave after wave of attack being repulsed on the Reds goal line.

When KES did eventually break break free, they went down to the other end and centre Sam Smith forced his way over under a pile of bodies for KES to take the lead. Bosch got another try soon after that, before Regan McGurk put the home side ahead, 14-10, a lead they never relinquished.

As much as anything, that defensive effort showed that the stumble against Paarl Gim was just a blip, and that this team does indeed have heaps of heart and courage, and that the boys certainly do know how to stop big runners in their tracks.

KES added two later penalties and led 20-10 for almost all of the second half before Rondebosch got a late try following a flurry of penalties going their way.

It was a great ending to what was one of the best days of festival rugby at KES in many years.

In the curtain-raiser, Jeppe also laid a ghost to rest following their 50-point defeat to Monument last weekend. Their skilful backs really turned it on and they scored six tries in their 38-17 win over Selborne.

The Affies vs Noordheuwel clash was billed as possibly the game of the day, and it didn’t disappoint. The sides are two of heavyweights up in this part of the country and they went at each other, hammer and tongs, for three quarters of the game before Affies scored two late tries to draw clear and win 45-27. The score was 26-15 to Affies at halftime and they were 31-27 up with 10 minutes to go.

In earlier action, the Hudson Park vs Eldoraigne clash was a thriller. It was a contrast of styles – direct play and big forwards from Eldoraigne and all-out trick running from Hudson Park. The sides swopped tries throughout the second half, with Hudson coming out ahead 32-26 at the end – a result that was popular with the big crowd that had begun to accumulate.

Northwood was too strong for Pearson in the opening game of the day, winning 61-27. Pearson’s scrumhalf, Denilo Jordaan, did score the try of the day, however. He took a tap penalty behind the goal line in the tuckshop corner, and weaved his way through the entire opposition team, to score under the scoreboard – you don’t see that every day.

Parktown was brave to start with against Queens College, but they couldn’t deal with the elusive running of the Queens backs and the went down 47-15.

I don’t recall seeing a bigger crowd at the festival and they got their money’s worth. Sunday is a rest day and we there will be more of the same on Monday.

It was all action at the KES Festival and the action hasn't even started

 

I am always amazed at the way that those running school sport find a way to heap more and more upon themselves in the cause of providing opportunities to get the children out there, playing.

Thursday was actually Day 0 at the Standard Bank KES Easter Festival – the 21^st one – but you wouldn’t think so if you went there. Last year it was decided to cut the number of rugby games played at the festival from three to two, in the interests of player safety. There is so much school rugby being played at this time of the year now that the Easter Festivals are no longer the early-season hit-out that the coaches use to do their final team selections, making three games ideal.

So, you’d think the lot that run the KES Festival - and it seems to be the same faces, led by the indefatigable Derron van Eeden, year after year – would use the quiet day to put the final touches to the mammoth task of squeezing everything in. You’d be wrong. They laid on seven rugby games – one more than on an official festival day – and gave those who did come along to watch a look at the work that the Golden Lions Union is doing in the townships of our city.

There were two under-13 Youth Club matches; games involving U16 and U18 girls team from their programme in that area; and a game between the KES 2^nd team and an U18 side selected from all their clubs.

That meant new faces and jersey colours at the festival, and the eye-opening experience of seeing that girls can play this game, and very well too. But that wasn’t enough.

The KES U15A and U16A teams played against Marais Viljoen. The Alberton school is not one that the school has met often down the years, but there is new rugby management there and, I’m sure, they were keen to see how they go against the best of English opposition, Their U15s have work to do, but the U16s gave the very good KES side some stern opposition and there are some boys there who can play.

Thursday is, of course, officially Day 1 as far as the hockey side of the Easter festival is concerned. Half a day, actually, as school was still on. The Red Sticks confirmed that they will be side to watch this year with an emphatic win over Glenwood, while the highly-ranked Maritzburg College and Jeppe had comfortable wins too. There’s a lot of hockey still to be played over the weekend – and they don’t take Sunday off.

The 1^st team rugby action gets going on Saturday and the schedule laid on is as intriguing as it has been for years. As a taster: Affies are playing Noordheuwel at 12.45pm on Saturday, ahead of games between Jeppe and Selborne; and KES against Rondebosch.

Queens College are here again with, I’m hoping, their usual big contingent of rowdy Joburg-based old boys; as is Northwood, the rising stars in Durban. The newcomers this year are Pearson High School, a Gqeberha school we’ve heard a lot about, but rarely see in these parts.

It’s going to be a good Easter,

Results

Hockey - Jeppe 4 Eldoraigne 1, Parktown 3 St Charles 1, Maritzburg College 4 Helpmekaar 1, KES 6 Glenwood 0, Northwood 2 Waterkloof 0.

Rugby - Eldorado Park U13 36 Westbury U13 0, Alexandra Wolves U13 75 Kagiso Sting U13 0, Golden Lions U16 Girls A 52 Golden Lions U16 Girls B 0, Golden Lions U18 Girls A 50 Golden Lions U18 Girls B 0, KES U15A 50 Marais Viljoen U15A 0, KES U16A 38 Marais Viljoen U16A 21, KES 2^nd XV 52 Golden Lions Development 3.