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.

What's a little rain?

You have to love cricket people and the lengths they will go to make it possible for the game to go ahead.

This week at the Switch Schools SA20 finals I watched the ground staff and officials spend an hour and half getting the wicket at the Tuks Oval to a state where a shortened game could take place. And just as the players were taking the field, the heavens really opened and everyone rushed to put the covers back on. Half an hour later the rain stopped and they took the covers off again, under the most ominous skies since the great flood.

They went back out again but the game was eventually abandoned after a few overs were bowled, when the rain came back again and time ran out.

The scenes were repeated the next day. In that case there were enough overs bowled for a result to be declared according to the Duckworth-Lewis method. It was interesting to see that, when the rain came back near the end and it was clear that it was all over, the fielding players took off to fetch the rain covers, followed closely by the batting team - leaving the dry of the clubhouse. It was instant and instinctive, it's a lesson cricketers are taught at their schools: when your game’s over you cover the pitch so that someone else can play on it tomorrow.

That finalists in the boys and girls sections were identified at the end of that rain-soaked week was testament to the determination that there must be play, if it's in any way possibe.

You have to love cricket people.

The Jeppe U14 festivals were absolutely worth the time and money

My sporting highlight of the weekend? ….. Well, the Lions thumping the Stormers, obviously, and St David’s showing they belong among the water polo top guns, producing that final against Bishops at the KES tournament.

But it’s got to be the two U14 festivals at Jeppe. They haven’t been tournaments for a number of years now and that’s how it should be. Two schools pulled out of it this year (a third did so last year) because, apparently, they think it is a waste of time and money if 13 year-olds aren’t playing for league points and a trophy – imagine that!

The festivals were great events without them. The disappointment I saw on faces when games were called off because of lightning and rain, showed that while the results don’t count, the boys want to play, and they play to win.

You can see the schools take their responsibility to teach the little ones properly by the quality of the coaches they send. The legendary Coach Vipes - Roland Andongndou, possibly the most experienced (and one of the more successful) school basketball coach around, was in the St Stithians corner at the basketball. The equally experienced Alex Christians is with the Jeppe team; and I spotted St John’s 1st team coach, Clemen Kock, watching his school’s babies with keen interest.

Down at the pool, there was one current national player, Luka Rajak, coaching the St John’s team and another – David Marshall - refereeing many of the games. The number one referee in the country, Lucky Letshabo, also officiated in some of the matches.

Steven La Marque a former director of coaching of SA Water Polo was there, coaching the Maritzburg College team; and Jason Sileno who has coached SA national sides at various levels, was there with St Stithians.

The water polo teams played nine games over their four days, the basketball teams slightly less. And in the absence of having to win at any cost, all the players in the squads got time on the court or in the pool. I was watching out for that particularly, and I can confirm that it happened.

If that’s not worth the money and effort, I’m not sure what is. 

School sport commercialism. Hell no!

 

I really don’t know where to begin with throwing in my two cents worth about the recent School Sport Commercialisation Conference. The idea that a sports programme in a school should be seen as generator of revenue is just so wrong to me that anything that might have been said at the conference, no matter how internally logical it may sound, and no matter how good it sounds in the narrow context of what was discussed, is the fruit of a poisoned tree, and I reject it all, without having heard a word of it.

I realise that makes me sound like a puritanical lunatic, but I think this so important that I’ll have to live with that.

I’ve been calling for a complete reset of school sport for some time (and we all know that we are really talking about school rugby here). The genie is out of the bottle, and we are never going to fix things incrementally. I find myself thinking, from time to time, that surely this is as bad as it can get. Recent examples are the ranking of sports schools in the country, which was just loony; the report on player movements between schools; and just last week, a list of school players to watch this season, like they do at the start of World Cup tournaments.

But this one takes the cake. Anyone who tells you it’s the role of schools to run sports programmes that make them attractive to sponsors and ultimately earn money for the school, should be run out of town and never allowed to return.

I get it that the popularity of schools rugby, in particular, is already generating money, and very little of it is going to the schools playing the games. I also know that rugby programmes, in this near professional era, are very expensive to run, and if they want to maintain and grow them, the schools need sponsorships.

But understanding is not approval. This latest development feels like a capitulation to those forces, without asking why they are there and if they belong in school sport.

They obviously don’t. And the real reason why is because the entire edifice is built on the children that play in the games. Are they being considered? Are we sucking more and more of the fun out of it all. To command the big bucks your teams have to perform. The demands placed on the children to make that happen are well documented, as are the dodgy practices that stem from that. The motivation behind it has been about things like school prestige, a magnet for recruitment, and a whole lot of ego for the adults involved. That boosting the commercial value of the school should be added to that list is so bad that, as I said, I just don’t know where to begin.

And it’s all terribly elitist, of course. The kind of commercialisation they are talking of is only for the haves. It’s been accepted that you can’t perform at that level without commercial input, so the top schools are the ones who have the means and they are the ones looking to boost their value. There are only a handful of them, and they were at that conference It’s not for the rest. It’s about the rich and greedy growing the pie and sharing it among themselves. The top of the pile gets higher and higher and the desert around them increases in size and aridity. Rugby is already dying everywhere outside of the schools in the top 20 ranking. This is accelerating the process.

I’m reminded of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The townsfolk were greedy, remember, and refused to pay the piper for his services. So, he led their children away. Gone forever. They were so concerned about money that they forgot all about the children. I hope we are not doing that too.