The Craven Week isn't supposed to be a knockout competition

A friend and colleague has in his collection all but four of the 55 Craven Week programme booklets that have been produced and he let me have a look at the one from 1987, the last time the week was here in Paarl.

I wasn’t at that week, my first one was the next year, as manager of the Transvaal XV, but it made interesting reading, no fewer than 12 future Springboks played in the week, and the late Hansie Cronje was the captain of the Free State team.

Transvaal and Natal played in the main game, which ended in a 22-all draw, with James Small and Brendan Venter in that Transvaal team. The coach of the Transvaal team was Niels Bornman, then at Monument, and the manager was Ian Adam. The Transvaal XV was coached by Max Arnold with Buks de Jager as manager. All four would become good friends of mine in the years to come.

Adam and De Jager both became headmasters, and both were chairman of the Transvaal Schools Association later on. Bornman and Arnold, both rugby men to their very souls have, sadly, both passed away.

I read Dr Danie Craven’s message in the programme and there it is – in the 24th year of the week’s existence – he still insists that there should be no winner, and that attractive running rugby, keeping the ball alive, should be rewarded.

As I put the booklet down, Free State and The Blue Bulls took the field at Paarl Boys’ High for their opening games, with everyone knowing that this was in effect a quarterfinal clash and the winners, irrespective of the type of rugby they played, would advance to the “semis” on Thursday and the winner there would be in Saturday’s “final”.

Free State won, and they played great rugby – Doc Craven would have approved – and they will meet the Sharks, who also played nice rugby, on Thursday.

So, no complaints there from me, except that there’s an air of inevitability about it all, as if it’s been stage-managed, with the aim of putting the hosts in the main game.

I said so in a piece I wrote for the SA Rugbymag website.

http://www.sarugbymag.co.za/craven-week-fixtures-favour-hosts/

It generated a few comments and one reader pointed out that I’m from Joburg, and associated with a Joburg school, and insinuated that I was having a biased go at WP.

Maybe I wasn’t clear, but I was really having a go at the system that manipulates the passage of the favoured team. Of course the same thing happened in Joburg last year. The Golden Lions were given Border on day one and they won a one-sided game 44-8. They then drew with Western Province on day 2 and were given the main game.

The same thing is happening in Paarl this year: WP beat the Pumas 74-10 on day, and they meet the Lions on Wednesday. The plan is clearly that they should win that one and draw a capacity crowd for the final on Saturday.

Province have a great side with some brilliant players and they would be worthy of a place in the final game. But that’s not really the point, is it?

The concept that the big guns get priority and the rest are making up the numbers never sits well with me. It’s not sporting, and it’s certainly not educational. Surely the Craven Week belongs to everyone and the lesser teams aren’t just here to fill out the programme and pass the time until the big games are played in the late afternoon?

Here’s an idea. It’s not original – they do it at the Khaya Majola cricket week each year. How about, on day one, matching all the top tier sides with lower ranked ones? Draw them out of a hat so that there are no knockout pools to eliminate threatening rivals.

Then let the fixtures committee (the SA Schools Rugby Association) use their years of experience to do their jobs and match the teams for their second fixtures on the quality of rugby they played while (probably) winning those games.

Everyone will have something to play for in their second outings and the last day’s fixtures can match the two best sides, the way Doc Craven wanted it done.

And the lesser sides will not be relegated to the early games, playing each other, year after year.

This was never supposed to be a knockout competition.  

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.