My sporting highlight - the Joburg Derby

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? .....

Well, there was Wits winning the Varsity Shield final on Friday night, and Rory’s thank yous at the Green Jacket ceremony at Augusta, but (with a bit of bias) it has to be Jeppe’s win over KES in the Joburg schools rugby derby.

It was as big a day as you’d come to expect. A capacity crowd, sideshows aplenty, and plenty of passion. KES, as expected, cleaned up in the rugby, across the board. They have the better players, particularly in the lower teams, and the better coaching. The best Jeppe could do was to try to keep in the games and not get blown away. It seems they did that – the losing margins, generally, were smaller than in previous years and there were not too many runaway scores.

Jeppe won the 1^st and second team games. Their 1^st team forwards were noticeably bigger, and KES couldn’t match their physicality which, the way the game has gone these days, generally results in defeat.

KES won the 1^st team hockey game. I saw that described as a shock defeat for Jeppe. It was not. KES had a much better run-in to the game, and Jeppe’s early season woes continued. They probably had more attacking intrusions than their opponents, but they couldn’t get past a resolute defence, and they squandered too many promising opportunities.

So, KES’ hockey win was expected, as was Jeppe’s rugby win – they had the bigger guns.

I’ve been going on for a while on the nature of ‘proper’ derbies. SuperSport Schools has taken to calling traditional inter-school fixtures derby games. They are not. Saturday’s game was: it was the 101^st clash of its kind, between schools that are close neighbours and it grabs the attention of a large part of the city.

In the process, the game gets hyped up to an acceptable level. It should be just another fixture, and the coaches do their best to keep their players grounded and away from the distractions, which is absolutely what they should do.

They don’t succeed, I’m afraid. 1^st team school rugby has evolved into something that no longer fulfils its educational mandate. There were “regular fixtures” in the old days, before winning at all costs, with the money to support it, became a feature of the game at this level. Those days are long gone.

The derby between Jeppe and KES is not just another game. It obviously should be, but it obviously isn’t. The crowds that attend it, the passion shown by both sides on and off the field, and the final-whistle reactions of the winners and losers, tell you that.

And I’ve taken some flak for saying so. I’ve been around these issues for an awfully long time, and I think my record and my writings have shown that I do know what school sport is actually all about. You can call it just another game, but no-one’s buying it.

Still, there’s nothing quite like being at a day like Saturday was. It was my highlight, hands down.   

The best Easter Festival? They are all unique and all fabulous.

We engaged on Saturday in the cricket museum at KES – that once a year doubles up as Derron van Eeeden’s control centre for their Easter Festival – in our annual discussion of which is the best of Joburg’s three annual rugby (and other sports) extravaganzas.

The lady from Standard Bank was there, so she could weigh in on what it’s like to deal with the three schools – KES, St John’s and St Stithians – from the sponsor side. I know nothing about those things, but I guess I’ve been going to these events for more years than anyone else that’s still around so I do have opinions.

I don’t have definitive answer, though. They all do one very special thing: they bring to Joburg, once a year, the fabulous rugby school from around the country that we as lovers of the game at this level only ever hear about. The advent of Supersport Schools has changed that, but it’s certainly still better to be there and to experience the atmosphere.

The Saints Festival was the first, so it will always hold a special place in my heart. I was at the very first one, in 1984. I was the coach of a team that would never be invited there and I watched schools like Bishops and Maritzburg College with wide-eyed wonder. Later, when I was a referee, I was one of the officials there for a few years, and part of the family. The after-match drinks in Dave Wylde’s house above the Jamieson field were very special. In fact, in the early days there were compulsory pre-match drinks too - the rival coaches were made to have a beer together before their teams met on the field, to make sure that the game would be played in the right spirit. Those days are long gone now.

The St John’s Festival came in 1998, and KES in 2002 Same-same but different. Each has its own character and way of doing things. I, as a wandering school sports reporter, used to spend one day at each at one stage. The rugby was always fabulous at all three and the hospitality top-class.

In the FNB days, a classic caravan was parked under a tree at one end of the ground at St John’s. It was the media centre and the forerunner of the fabulous communications structure that they lay on now. Without a doubt, the best place to watch the rugby from, as a working journalist, is the St John’s media venue. 

Since my retirement as a reporter, KES is where I spend Easter each year (full disclosure: they pay me to be there, although I would gladly pay them for the experience). They give me a place to sit in the tournament office, and I leave at the end of each Festival 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 know the same activities are going on at the other two festivals, but at KES I see it for myself.

And the person at the center of it is Derron Van Eeden. She has been the festival director at King Edward’s for all the festivals they’ve had and she knows how to do the job. The grace and efficiency she brings to the never-ending queue of queries that is her day, is quite amazing to see.

So, which festival is best? I couldn’t possibly say, of course. But on Saturday, as I sat in my corner of the cricket pavilion at KES, behind a mountain of boxes of T shirts, accreditation tags, walkie talkie chargers, and marshmallow Easter eggs; with recency bias and self-interest in my mind, I thought: you’d have to go a long way to beat this one.