Talent spotting is a Craven Week tradition

It was the great Aaron Sorkin who said that if you copy from yourself it’s not plagiarism. The writer of the West Wing was answering criticism that the same lines crop up over and over, in the different TV series and movie scripts he has written down the years.

In that spirit, I confess that some of what I’m going to say now I’ve said before – in a 2009 column that I wrote – and that some cutting and pasting has taken place here.

It’s just that as I was packing to leave for the Craven Week in Paarl tomorrow, I had the strongest memories of the journalists I used to see there every year. This will be my 27^th Craven Week, in 30 years. I missed three. Once because I was spoken into going overseas instead and twice because the Star was too stingy to pay for me to go. In those days they still forked out for reporters to report on events that they were actually at.

My memory was jogged by seeing Morris Gilbert at the USSA rugby week at Wits last week. Morris was a rugby writer at the Beeld. He’s the high performance manager at Tuks rugby club now. He was a constant presence at the early Craven Weeks that I attended and he was a firm believer in the principles that the week was based on. We all learned a lot from him.

He told me his first week was in 1982 in Windhoek and he had anecdotes from just about everyone since then.

He made me think of another Craven Week regular from those days, a retired headmaster called Dawie Crowther, and here’s where the copying begins.

Talent-spotting has always been a past time among regulars at the Craven Week. And there is a surprising number of fans who attend the week each year, just to revel in the feast of rugby. Predicting who will rise above their peers in the years to come is all part of the fun.

I have been lucky enough to attend just about every Craven Week since 1988 as a reporter and, I confess, I have dabbled in some soothsaying of my own in that time.

My success in predicting who was going to make it to the big time has been dodgy. There were others around me, however, who would select entire teams of standout players, and their forecasts were often very accurate.

The best of those was Dawie Crowther, an old-timer who was a Craven Week coach and SA Schools selector in his day and who continued attending the week for many years once he had retired.

His speciality was choosing the outstanding player of a particular week and, with very few exceptions all of those he marked went on to play for South Africa.

At one of those weeks, an Afrikaans newspaper asked him to name the 15 players who had made the biggest impression on him over all the years that he attended the week. I regret that I never wrote down that team, it would make interesting reading now.

I do, however, remember quite a few of his selections. Some of them seem like pretty logical choices now: Whal Bartman in 1981, Reuben Kruger in 1988, Os du Randt in 1990, Corne Krige and Louis Koen in 1993, Joe van Niekerk in 1997, Bakkies Botha in 1998 and Jean de Villiers in 1999.

Crowther stopped attending the Craven Week at some stage, I don’t remember seeing him at any week after 1999. He did tell me that the change in the age cut off at the tournament - it was changed to under-18 in 1998 - meant the end of the really dominant individual stars. Before that, as an under-19 tournament, you would find in every team a number of players who were at their second, or even third tournament and that experience generally told.

Interestingly, when pressed for who over all the years made the biggest impression on him, he came up with two names who never played for South Africa. In fact one of them never played serious rugby again.

The first was Stephen Brink, who played for Free State at the 1991 and 1992 weeks. He did play Currie Cup rugby for Free State and Sevens for South Africa and, famously, for New Zealand at the Hong Kong Sevens one year when the All Blacks had so many injuries that they could no longer field a full side.

Crowther’s most outstanding player over all his years, and I and just about everyone else who had the pleasure of seeing him play rugby as a schoolboy would have to agree, was one Herschelle Gibbs. He took the 1992 Craven Week in Pretoria by the scruff of the neck and almost single-handedly won the main game for Western Province, 22-16 against Free State, that year.

Unfortunately for rugby, Gibbs was also quite good at cricket and the rest, as they say, is history.

There won’t be a Herschelle Gibbs in Paarl next week, there will only ever be one of him, I can guarantee that. There will be talent aplenty though and we are going to hear from more than one or two again in the years to come.

Get our rugby players' axes sharp, before they tackle the trees

There’s been a bit of lively debate from the keyboard crusaders following my endorsement of Dan Retief’s views in his excellent piece entitled SA’s junior talent drying up?

https://www.alloutrugby.com/sas-junior-talent-drying/

Retief bemoans the poor performance, again, of the under-20s at the recent world champs, and concludes that, in the handful of schools that those players come from, they are not learning the things that will make them “perfectly rounded players possessing the mental and physical abilities to be the best over a sustained period of time.”

We South African’s tend to believe that our rugby players are bigger, stronger, more physical and more aggressive than anyone else’s. Retief points out that that isn’t actually the case anymore, but our top schools strive to make their players fit that mould anyway. And if they don’t have the material to do that, they scour the land and buy it from other schools somewhere else.

Hardly, I and others have been on and on about, the formula for sustained rugby success.

Those who have been commenting on this have pointed to the success of our top schools against international opposition, and have explained what it is that the New Zealand schools do. Rugby at a top five school is a serious business and it should be treated that way, one of them wrote.

Of course it is, and of course it should be. But if winning games and rising to the top of the rankings is the dominant value that underpins their operation then, I believe, they are doing us a disservice.

It was Abraham Lincoln, apparently, who said “give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." It’s led to an oft-quoted business principle referring to the need to get what you need to get the job done in order, before you rush in and try to do the work.

Here’s a sports coaching analogy. Swimming coaches spend hours on drills to get their swimmers' technique right. They make them wear flippers – not to make the go faster, but to allow them to keep going forward while they work, in fine detail, on their stroke – they don’t, these days, concentrate on strength, stamina and mental attitude alone.

Sure, at junior level the strongest, fittest and most bloody-minded swimmers will win races, but you need to learn the basics if you want to be good in the long run.

The South African rugby game plan is based on physical domination, on effective kick-chasing and brutal defence. It’s what won us two World Cups and I agree with those who say we will never beat the All Blacks by playing an expansive, open game.

The problem is that the All Black are better than us at the physical game too, and they have the skills to use the opportunities that come their way to score tries out wide.

The answer to Retief’s question is no – there is still plenty of talent. We are just expecting them to play South African rugby at school level without teaching them the skills that a good rugby player needs to have before he is taught to play any style at all.

We are expecting them to chop down the trees without taking the time to ensure that their axes are sharp enough to do so.

School rugby is no longer our strength

There has, predictably, been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth following the exit of yet another supremely talented SA under-20 team from the World Rugby under-20 championships this week.

The keyboard cowboys have been all over the social media, looking for someone to blame. The consensus seems to be that the team was poorly coached although a good number blamed transformation and the quota system, of course.

Now, I’ve been known to whinge with the best of them and my complaints have nothing to do with transformation. I’m just dismayed at how we have allowed our greatest advantage – our school rugby set up – become our greatest weakness while all the while the so-called boffins praise the professionalisation of rugby at school level and wax lyrical about the top 10 rated schools in the land.

 

There was an eloquent description of what’s going on in schools rugby on the Daily Maverick site by Zac Elkin this week.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-06-11-a-fork-in-the-road-is-coming-for-south-african-school-rugby/amp/

He says what many of us have been saying for the past two or three years, but it’s a timely reminder, as the Junior Boks bomb out again, that school rugby is not as healthy as we all think it is. He makes the point that the emergence of a limited number super schools is killing the game because their historical rivals are disappearing.

Elite sport is about exceptional individuals, we all know that. But it’s also a numbers game. The broader the base of the pyramid the higher the apex will be. That’s why Georgia, who have some impressive rugby specimens in their under-20 team, will never threaten New Zealand or England at senior levels. They simply don’t have enough players to be good across the board.

We used to have that in our schools rugby. We have some great athletes, great coaches and teams that play great rugby, but there are way fewer schools and players in total. There’s an explanation for the failure of our age group teams – remember that the under-18s were whitewashed in a series involving England France and Wales last year as well.

And you really do have to look at coaching. Last year former Springbok captain André Vos, tweeting after the Springboks were thrashed by New Zealand, wrote that the problem with SA rugby begins at school level.

“Crash-ball, pod rugby taught at schools is destroying the game in SA. They don't get taught spacial (sic) awareness and decision making skills,” he said.

He is exactly right, and many of us have been saying it for a while now. The best coaches in the land are at the schools, no question about that, and they are coaching with a professional attitude. Winning is the only thing that matters, so they are under pressure to produce teams that win and climb up the rankings. They don’t see it as their responsibility to develop a large base of players who have mastered the basic skills of the game, and who are at the appropriate level of skill and physiological development for their ages.

The top coaches are accumulators of talent, they don’t develop it. The best available talent is concentrated in those few “super schools” and the teams are coached, very effectively, to win games. That means perfecting the style of play that Vos describes: crash-ball, pod rugby. Why change a winning formula? The coach creates a team that wins and he sticks to a rigid game plan that guarantees success.

The performance of our national teams have shown that there’s more to it than that. Some called André Vos daft, but he is right. Spatial awareness and decision-making is lacking in many of our top players. If players are taught to set pods, and to create targets for forwards to drive into, then they are taught to focus on the 10 metres directly in front of them, and they aren’t aware of space.

And if the coach demands that they stick to the game plan because that’s what brings success, then they never learn to decide for themselves. That’s why the under-20s found themselves 20 points down in a wink of an eye against France, and England.

Is it why the Springboks were in a similar predicament last weekend? You decide for yourself.

It's not always all bad

I’ve become a sceptic when it comes to schools rugby. I usually expect the worst from schools, and I’m seldom disappointed.

In the last two weeks, however, I witnessed two events that restored my faith and reminded me that the people who dedicate so much time and effort so that schoolboys can play the game are among the best you’ll find.

And then, just as I was getting carried away, I came across a deeply disturbing situation at a school, one that confirmed my cynical views.

More of that later – first the good. I was at KES two weekends ago when Pine Pienaar, the highly qualified ex Blue-Bulls coach who has been hired, I assume to get Waterkloof’s 1^st team on the winning track, did something you don’t always see.

The referee, and his assistants, were somehow confused about a KES penalty goal attempt that everyone sitting at that end of the ground could see went over. A discussion ensued and the ref ruled it unsuccessful. The Waterkloof coaches were at that end and they too saw it cross the crossbar. One of them turned and told Pienaar that and he, immediately, went on the field, told the ref so, and it was reversed, giving KES three points at a stage when the game was still quite close.

Pienaar is a rugby boffin, everyone knows that. Now those who were there know he is also a true sportsman, with integrity. It was great to see.

And then there was last weekend’s game between Jeppe and Affies. Jeppe have never won that fixture and they were 41-38 up with time expired when Affies constructed a move that began in their own 22m area and ended with the winning try in the opposite corner.

It was heartbreaking for Jeppe, but the things that have been said since, including a wonderful letter by the headmaster, describing how Muzi Manyike, the 1^st team captain, and head boy, reacted to the defeat, have been amazing.

It showed that there can be a victory that has nothing to do with the final score.

For me, the cynicism-destroying moment came before the game. Muzi, and the vice captain, accompanied a tiny disabled boy onto the field to place the ball on the centre spot. And Muzi carried him off again. I learned afterwards that he is from an Aids orphanage close to the school, and the whole idea was Manyike’s himself.

Use the occasion of a big game to do something like that, and who cares if you win or lose?

The dampener came this week when I read an open letter to a school that appeared on a schools rugby website.

Read it yourself - http://www.talk.ruggas.co.za/?p=865 - and decide.

I found it very sad. For me, it sums up the gulf in thinking that exists between two groups of lovers of schoolboy rugby. Basically, it describes how Hoërskool Nelspruit is considering its options because its 1^st team is being beaten in the new Virseker Cup super league.

The writer predicts that if they leave the league, or step down a division, they will lose all their top players, their coaches, their standing in the community and their invitation to the St John’s Easter Festival.

They could well lose players to the cut-throat professionally run schools who will scoop them at a discounted price. What’s really alarming, however, is the assumption that they, and the coaches, will be prepared to go – no loyalty or school camaraderie there.

I do know a bit about how the Joburg Easter festival hosts think and I know that Nelspruit are invited back to St John’s each year because the organisers enjoy them as people, they like their rugby philosophy and the way the play the game. Whether they carry on playing Garsfontein, Monument and Helpmekaar or not next year will have nothing to do with their next invitation, I’d wager.

Here’s hoping there is more that’s good than bad at this weekend’s matches.