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 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.