The lessons learnt were evident at the 2-day cricket

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? ….. I was only at one event all weekend, and the SA cricket team is the workiest of works in progress at the moment, so it has to be the St David’s Marist cricket festival.

I’ve said plenty  about how much I like the concept of non-limited overs cricket at school level and the cricketing and life lessons that can be taught via it. There were certainly many of those evident over the four days. Two of the captains declared their first innings while their teams were behind. Both those games ended in draws anyway, but they understood the concept of risking losing to have a chance of victory. In contrast, there several cases where sides batted on too long and the captains were kicking themselves, I’m sure, when the opposition were able to hold on for the draw, six or seven down, and still 50 or 60 runs short. 

There were 11 centuries, and over 30 half centuries scored in the 12 matches. Batsmen were allowed to play themselves in, and several went to bed 50 plus not out at the end of the day and had to come back the next morning and kick on from there.

There were also 14-odd five wicket hauls, all by spin bowlers. They all bowled a lot of overs and some shipped a lot of runs in the process, but they were given the opportunity to learn what their craft is all about, and their role in the complex and multi-faceted game of cricket.

Then there are the social and life lessons learnt by teenagers spending four days doing one thing in one place in the hectic times they live in. I saw teams sitting quietly in the shade watching the action together (I suspect the coaches were forcing that one); I saw an entire team disappear down the hillside at The Higher Ground to look for a lost ball; I saw many rounds of applause for opponents’ performances – 50s and 100s scored , unplayable balls bowled, and at the man of the day ceremonies at the end of each; day I saw a wicketkeeper take off his gloves and tie a batsman’s loose shoelace; and a fielder stretching out the leg of a cramping batsman.

And at the end of it all I watched the three prize winners – batsman, bowler and player of the festival – being mobbed and congratulated by players from all the teams (along with many requests for them to give them the kit and vouchers that went along with the awards).

You don’t get those sorts of things with other games. That’s cricket, and it’s the reason why so much of what we see in sport these days, including at school level, simply is not.

 

I'm part of the Fasken, and glad to be

 

Some time back there used to be rugby tournament organised by Roodepoort Rugby Club at this time of the year, for “stayers” – boys in grade 11 or younger. They had a sponsorship from the West Rand branch of ABI and it was called the Coca-Cola series.

That sponsorship disappeared at some stage, but the tournament went on (it’s gone now, I think, and the Rand Leases ground where it used to be held is now an informal settlement I’m told) but it was still referred to as the “Coke series” for as long as it survived.

I was reminded of that story this weekend while attending the St David’s Time Cricket Festival because we were discussing the value of branding and how the quality of a sponsored event (sporting in this case) can create an enduring bond between the sponsor and the occasion.

The St David’s festival is sponsored by Sandton Law firm Fasken, this is the sixth year of the partnership and already the name has stuck. “Are you going to the Fasken week this year?” “Gee, we wish we could be invited to the Fasken next year.” Those are phrases spoken among schools cricket people that I’ve heard, and I’m sure those sorts of things are said quite often in those circles.

This is the Fasken Festival, no question. I’ve no idea how long-standing the sponsorship will be, but they, together with the very clever marketing people at St David’s, have made their brand part of the schools cricket lexicon. And what the word means is “long format time cricket.”

Two-day matches are something unique in schools cricket and they are based on both cricket and educational principles, which is why the concept has caught on and why there is a demand from schools around the country to be included, which can’t happen until someone who is here drops out, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

I’m not just saying the St David’s marketing department people are clever because they invite me each year to say nice things about their event. They’ve applied the marketing principle of differentiating themselves and standing out from the crowd by finding a niche – this type of cricket, and a football tournament that is inclusive in its outlook – and overdelivered in terms of organisation, facilities, level of competition and hospitality.

There’s a case study in there, I think. I’m lucky and glad to be part of it.

And I get to watch another set of two-day games involving some of the fabled cricketing schools of the land, starting today!

The lessons of the longer game

 

I’m off to St David’s this morning to watch the cricket – the same games I watched yesterday, and most of them aren’t even half way through yet. They started at 9 yesterday morning and they’ll go on until 6 tonight and, even then, it’s likely that some won’t be finished and they’ll be called draws.

And everyone will be back again tomorrow for the next round of games, which will carry on until Sunday night and, again, some of them won’t produce results.

There are many who question the sanity of a sport that allows that to happen – it drives the Americans to distraction. There you have extra time in every game, at every level, there has to be a result, they say – otherwise why play?

What’s happening at St David’s is time cricket and at international level it goes on for five days and even then there might not be a winner in the end. And the amazing thing is that cricket people (the purists, anyway) love it. So do the international players – they make their living out of shorter formats of the game, but just about every time you hear one of them being asked, they say Test cricket is what the game is all about.

The Fasken Time Cricket Festival on at St David’s this weekend is school sport, remember, and school sport should be education first, competition second. That’s something I’m always banging on about, although it’s a losing battle. Winning has become so important that, in most codes but especially rugby, school sport has become pretty much professional in its approach.

That applies to cricket too and you see the worst of it in the shorter formats of the game, like T20. It shouldn’t be that way. Cricket has the potential to be a great educational tool, and good schools and coaches see it that way. That’s not to say that winning isn’t important, it is the point of playing, but it’s not the only thing.

Which is the great thing about this festival. It was born out of a recognition that the cricketing education of school boys is incomplete if they are fed a diet of limited overs cricket only. But it also recognises that school cricket can and must teach other lessons too.

The learnings are well articulated in the festival brochure – things like building an innings, bowling an intense spell, and coming back to do it again later; fielding for an entire day, and coming back to do it again tomorrow; and for the captains, the art of declaration – risking loss to give yourself a chance of victory, and buying a wicket by keeping your run-leaking spinner on a while longer. Think of the business lessons in those last two points.

It's a cricket tradition to appreciate your opponents – the players will applaud an opponent when he scores a 50 or 100, in which other game do you get that? And coaches will generally talk about their opponents more that themselves, I heard that in the bar at St David’s last night again.

And that’s another point that the Fasken Festival intentionally makes. The players are told to watch their opponents appreciatively all day and decide who performed the best out of them. And after the day’s play, their captain will present him with a purple cap and they will applaud him. Who cares if at the end of the two days the game is drawn – those little ceremonies alone are victories in my eye.

Cricket's here - that's my highlight

 

Lots to choose from when deciding on a highlight of the week gone by.

The Boks hammering the All Blacks, of course – dare we hope? And that ovation for Siya Kolisi from the crowd.

The last gasp win by Rondebosch over Bishops in a Cape Town Southern suburbs derby that lived up to that description; watching KES and Jeppe draw 1-1 on the main rugby field at KES – and remembering that when we first tried to introduce football at Joburg schools, KES refused and, if the story’s correct, soccer balls were once totally banned on the so-called Reds field; Garsfontein’s Noordvaal trophy win over EG Jansen – their first since 2016 – with Monument winning the U14 and 15 finals and Helpmekaar the U16, showing that recruitment is alive and well the in Golden Lions Schools; and the news that Rand Park High came within four points of Northcliff at the Joburg co-ed schools athletics interhigh – seriously threatening that 26-year unbeaten run.

But, for me, it’s been the drawing of circles around the frost-bleached fields around town, ignoring the lanes marked out and the fading touch and try lines – cricket season is here. It’s been a long, cold winter and we felt this weekend that it isn’t over yet, but I have faith that come next Thursday, when 12 of the top schools descend on St David’s Marist Inanda, the weather will turn and we can settle down to a different kind of excitement.

And the St David’s Fasken festival is different. The teams play two games each, with two days set aside for each. It’s time cricket. Which means its not limited overs. The captains are expected to declare and set targets, if their side isn’t bowled out, just like in Test cricket.

This is the fourth time the format is being used – the man behind it is former provincial coach Dave Nosworthy – and the idea is to teach the boys a whole bunch of new skills, cricketing and other. I love the idea, and so do a lot of school coaches – there’s a waiting list of teams wanting to be invited.

So, the World Cup’s coming and rugby will be occupying our minds, but the great game – that’s what St David’s headmaster Mike Thiel calls it, seeing that football has appropriated the name the “beautiful game” – will be what I’ll be watching next weekend.

The fixtures for the St David’s Fasken Festival are:

 August 31 and September 1 - Jeppe vs Clifton (Gier Oval, St David’s), St David’s vs Maritzburg College (La Valla Oval, St David’s), Lions vs KES (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs Waterkloof (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), St John’s vs St Andrew’s (Baytop Oval, St Stithians), Paul Roos vs Noordheuwel (La Rosey Oval, St David’s).

September 2 and 3 – Jeppe vs Paul Roos (Gier Oval, St David’s), St David’s vs Lions (La Valla Oval, St David’s), KES vs Clifton (La Rosey Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs St Andrew’s (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), St John’s vs Maritzburg College (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), Noordheuwel vs Waterkloof (Baytop Oval, St Stithians).

The St David's festival was a good way to see the new season in

 

So, the 2023 winter schools sport season is over, and the quite spectacular St David’s Challenge Cup soccer tournament saw the new one in last weekend.

The standard of play, someone who knows the game far better that I do said, wasn’t as high as it has been in some years, but the sheer size of the thing, the number of boys involved, the number of games they played and the quality of the organisation: the fields, officiating, catering, and the updating of the tournament standings as we went along, were outstanding.

I’ve been to lots of these things over the years, including those run by Sasfa – the schools football association that was part of SAFA, until they were kicked out because of a dispute between the bodies over funding and sponsorship - and I’d say this was a good as it could possibly be.

The event doubled in size this year with the introduction of under-14 and under-16 sections, played at St Stithians. It was a separate tournament, although it is also called the Challenge Cup, and there is some co-ordination – the idea is that the participating schools will send teams to all four competitions, making it more of a mass participation event.

One significant difference, I thought, was that both the competitions at Saints were played as full on tournaments with cross pool playoffs, quarterfinals, semis and a final. At St David’s the U15 section was a festival. There was a division into a top eight and a bottom eight after the first rounds of games, but they then played another round-robin, with no consequences.

There was an under-15 winner at St David’s up until last year but it has been changed, I was told, on request from the headmasters of the boys schools, who don’t want U14s and 15s, who are still learning to play the game, to participate in any kind of league.

That’s why the U14 basketball and water polo tournaments that round off the 1^st term are festivals now, without winners. I’m not sure why the U14s at Saints played for a cup, they shouldn’t have.

That said, the Grade 8s, fresh out of primary school where football was the game they played, were given ample opportunity to keep on playing it – that hasn’t always been the case.

So, it’s football for the next few weeks, with the cricketers already starting to loosen up – I’ll be back at St David’s in two weeks time for the excellent Fasken Two-Day Festival, more about that later.

What we won’t be seeing is school athletics, not at the boys schools anyway. I find it strange and uncharacteristic that they seem to have capitulated on that one. I’m sure they have their reasons and I know the really serious athletes compete in more structured competitions in the first term now. But what about the others?

My experience is that there are those who aren’t much good at some of the events, but who bust a gut at them anyway. I’m going to miss watching that stoutly-built youngster who doesn’t belong anywhere near the 1500m, giving it his all to finish and earn a point for his school. And to hear the applause he gets when he comes down the straight a minute behind the winner. There used to be lessons taught and learnt that way too.

The St David's semifinalists are a fascinating mix

 

There’s an interesting mix of schools playing in the semifinals of the St David’s Marist Inanda Challenge Cup Soccer tournament today.

By the time you read this the games will probably have been played, but they featured Norkem Park vs Brebnor High School in the one, and King Edward VII School vs St Stithians College in the other.

Two who, by the standards that most of us measure sporting schools by, are not well-known, and two who have produced top teams and provincial and international players aplenty in a range of sporting codes for many years.

It’s a reflection, in the first place of the egalitarian nature of football. You don’t need a million dollar facility to play the game, nor do you need expensive equipment or fancy kit. It’s what makes it the “world game”. Although, clearly, neither Brebnor nor Norkem got to the standard that we saw at St David’s this weekend by playing pick-up games in the veld somewhere. Norkem Park are regulars at the tournament, and perennial achievers, while Brebnor are here for the first time, but they came with quite a reputation, and its well deserved.

KES and St Stithians have long and proud sporting traditions, and they offer just about every sporting activity under the sun to their learners. They both had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Joburg schools football setup. There was a referendum among the boys at KES in the 1990s, the story goes about whether they wanted to play soccer or rugby and soccer won. The result was buried by the authorities who were hoping to use it to keep soccer out of the school! St Stithians were reluctant participants at first, mainly because the difference in term dates between state and private schools made it difficult to fit a season in.

Well, they are certainly both in it now, and they do have the facilities and equipment required to run top-class programmes. KES, simply, takes everything they do seriously, and St Stithians have put a lot of time and effort into soccer as an area where they have the potential to differentiate themselves.

Those trying to make sense of the absurd situation of South African soccer being where it is on the international rankings, despite having possibly the best league on the continent and certainly the best facilities, often blame it on the fact that our so-called top schools are rugby institutions, where the boys are not allowed to practice the round ball code.

They are wrong. Soccer is, of course, played at the vast majority of schools across the land, and thanks to schools like St David’s who go to the trouble to put on events like the Challenge Cup, almost all of the so-called rugby schools also have excellent football programmes too.

So, the problem is not one of access to the game, it’s one of not optimally using the school system as the major developmental nursery the way that the other sporting codes, like rugby, do.

I never saw a Safa official or a scout from one of the professional clubs at St David’s this weekend. They should be here – there are players in those four semi-finalist teams that they should be taking a look at. And they aren’t the only ones in action in Inanda this weekend.

 

Back at the place where it all began

 

The last few schools rugby matches are being played this weekend, but there’s no doubt that the first weekend of August, in Joburg, belongs to the beautiful game.

It’s St David’s Marist Inanda Soccer Challenge Cup time – it’s been that way since 2003. I was at the opening day on Friday and it occurred to me that the 576 boys in action there probably had no appreciation for the role that St David’s has played in making football the growing school sport that it is.

When Shane Gaffney, director of sport at St David’s at the time, first had the idea of a tournament like this part of the idea was to kick-start the game in the boys schools in Joburg. Football in the third term was only beginning to take root and it was mainly the Model C co-ed schools who participated, along with St David’s and Highlands North. The boys schools, until then were fiercely resisting the idea of introducing the game at their rugby-obsessed schools, but when they saw a well-run tournament, based on sound educational principles was in place and that it was attracting some of the elite schools from around the country, they had to join in. Eventually they all gave in to the demand for the game in their communities.

Because a third term season is so short, squeezed in between summer and winter, a tournament makes sense. Each team will play six games over the three days at St David’s, and they are full-length matches. Most of the schools will play three or four tournaments of this kind in the season and the upshot is that, far from a brief “after-thought” of a season, the 1^st football team will typically play more matches than the 1^st rugby team will.

It was a U19 tournament at first, U15 teams were added in 2009, and this year there are U14s and U16s too, playing at St Stithians. That makes it a massive undertaking. There are 32 teams at each venue and a total of 96 matches will be played at each over the three days. And it runs like a well-oiled machine. Brad Ireland, St David’s sport director is the organiser and right next to him all the time in Franco Gilardi, who has been involved since 2007. Between them, they have pretty much nailed the model, although they do tweak it a little every year. “We extended the U-19 games to 35 minutes a side this year, for example, and we are considering brining in rolling substitutions from next year, Ireland said.

It’s an undoubted success story, and it was St David’s that started it all. Football is growing as a school sport, in numbers and quality. If it were not for the vision on Shane Gaffney and the dedication of Brad Ireland, Franco Gilardi and the people who have kept the tournament going, it would never have happened.

The beautiful game kicks off this weekend. It’s been great watching it happen.