Saints double makes schools hockey history

 

My sporting highlight of the week? ………….

The St Stithians Girls College won the Pullen Cup tournament, the premier local girls hockey knockout competition, beating Noordheuwel in the final last Saturday.

The Pullen Cup is named after Rob Pullen, a former South African international player and national mens coach. He was director of sport at St Andrew’s Girls’ School when, in 2006, it was decided by the organisers of girls hockey that they needed the equivalent of the Aitken Cup – the long-standing boys hockey knockout tournament – as well as a junior competition similar to the U15 boys Boden Trophy. So, they introduced an U19 and an U16 tournament and named them after Rob Pullen and Ros Howell, who was the head of hockey at St Mary’s at the time and, like Pullen, a former national player and national senior team coach.

The interesting thing is that, this year, St Stithians won both U19 competitions. It’s the first time that’s happened. The Boys College won the Aitken Cup back in May when they beat Jeppe, in a one-on-one shootout after clawing their way back from 2-0 down to level matters with seconds remaining in normal time. It was my highlight of the week back then, and I remember noting that there can be fewer things in sport more dramatic than the eight-second contests between shooter and ‘keeper that are used as a tie-breaker in hockey these days.

The Pullen and Aitken tournaments have, in recent years been dominated by two schools. St Mary’s won the girls title eight times out of the 16 it has been played, and were the defending champions going into this year’s edition. Jeppe have won the Aitken Cup more times than anyone else and they had six consecutive titles under their belts when Saints stopped their run this year.

I’ve always found victories by the underdogs stirring so, while I know that long term winners don’t set up those records by chance – it’s usually because they work harder than anyone else – it’s great, as an outsider, to watch newcomers go into the contest with no respect for the history and a fierce determination to make their own. 

St Stithians did that this year, twice. It sets things up nicely for next year. Will those former champions bounce back, or are we seeing the start of a new dynasty? We are lucky to have schools so closely matched in Joburg schools sport. It’s what has kept me a keen follower of it for all these years.

Roll on 2024.

 

My sporting highlight - the Joburg derby

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? …. Easy, the Jeppe vs KES derby.

That’s not just because Jeppe won both the 1^st team games, although it was good to see that the rugby gods don’t keep an office at 44 St Patrick’s Road after all, seeing that KES snatched victory from the jaws of defeat three times in a row in the lead-up to this one.

No, it was a cracking game, played in front of a capacity crowd, with instances of individual brilliance from players on both sides and, backs-to-the-wall, bloody-minded defence from both teams when it was needed too.

There were mistakes, but the boys were under intense pressure in that cauldron, and the weight of expectation must have been massive on them. Yet they kept their cool. I never saw single incident of bad temper, even.

And, once again, the game was an advert for transformation. There were black players aplenty on the field and they were often breathtaking. Talent, obviously, knows no race, players at good schools, with the facilities, coaching and playing opportunities will develop into stars. That’s the model – no need for even thinking about quotas.

I watched the amount of planning and hard work put in by the people at Jeppe, over the last two weeks, to try to cope with a crowd that size, watching a game of that intensity. They succeeded, I think. The SuperSport Schools commentators were bandying numbers of 12 to 15 thousand about, but the estate manager at Jeppe, Laurie Stegmann, and I once calculated, block by block, how many people could fit in around the ground and we came up with eight to nine thousand. All of them were there on Saturday, plus at least another one or two thousand who never got near the field.

It was a special day, but both KES and Jeppe really cannot cope with the spectator expectations any more. Maybe it’s time to do what they do at the Paarl derby – the only one that’s bigger than this one, I’d say - and take the game to a stadium that has the seating, and parking, to handle the numbers.

Still, Saturday was one of those “I was there” occasions that will be long remembered by those who were.

The World Cup is around the corner and the refs have got me scared

 

I’m worried about how the World Cup is going to be refereed.

I obviously have no problem with the decision to put player safety first and, in principle, with the zero tolerance attitude to contact with the head.

Cards have been issued as never before in the last year, and that would be fine if there were a way to make them completely consistent in the same way that a forward pass, for example, always results in a scrum – although they are trying their best to stuff even that one up and after replays we get clear cases where the ball went forward being ruled OK these days.

But no, there still doesn’t seem to be uniformity in the application of the head contact area among the refs, just over a month out from the World Cup. In the yellow and red card-rich new world of rugby, the coaches and teams have, obviously, worked hard at learning how to play with a man down, so getting a player sent off doesn’t automatically result in defeat the way it did a few years ago, but it still gives a huge advantage to the opponents and there’s no doubt that some of the games played in France in September and October are going to be decided, in effect, by the referee red-carding a player.

So, they had better get it right! But they are not. We don’t know how the “bunker” system for TMOs is going to play out, but up until now, the television officials in big matches have played a big role in pointing out incidents that lead to cards. That’s what they are there for – but then they have to see everything. There are far too many keyboard warriors who post video clips of all the “high shots” that all four officials miss after just about every game, to make the contests fair. No-one likes a Monday morning quarterback, but sadly those guys are mostly right. Even when a player who was hit high makes a song and dance of it and gestures extravagantly, hoping to prompt the TMO into taking another look - like Faf de Klerk did against Australia - not every incident is pointed out to the referee.

That means, in effect that some forward passes will be blown up, and some won’t.

Andrew Brace will be one of the referees in France. After what happened on Saturday night, we should all be worried. He called the knockout blow on Grant Williams an “unavoidable rugby incident”. Maybe it was, but SuperSport replayed the CJ Stander – Pat Lambie incident after the game and the two cases are identical. Stander was red-carded, Juan Cruz Mallia wasn’t even penalised. If the same things are adjudicated differently, then the contests can never be fair.

We’ve been told that the fact of contact to the head is the thing that counts, intention, bad luck and even the actions of the player who was hit, don’t matter. Players are being sent off every week and in almost none of the cases are their actions intentional. The words “reckless” and “irresponsible” are sometimes used. Yet Brace condoned this incident because it was unavoidable and not reckless.

Rugby is a quick, dynamic game, referees are human, they make mistakes and they are sometimes unsighted, but now that World Rugby has created this mess they had better find a way to make it work fairly, despite all of that.

I don’t think they can – that’s why I’m worried about how the World Cup is going to be refereed.

A mixed bag of sporting highlights

My sporting highlight of the week? ….  Well, the Springboks, obviously. It was especially nice to have a scrumhalf who passed the ball and didn’t box kick it relentlessly. Which led to some great tries.

Then the rugby Youth Weeks. The Golden Lions romped home in the Academy Week, which wasn’t that surprising seeing that there were four or five players there who certainly should have been at the Craven Week instead. The Jeppe/KES midfield combination was great to watch and how those players were not considered good enough for the A team can only be attributed to one-eyed selection, I’m afraid. And in the end the two-school strategy followed didn’t work and the Craven side lost two out of their three matches.

It was nice to be at one of these weeks again. I went to every Craven Week, bar two, between 1988 and 2018, so I’d had enough by the time I retired and stopped going, but I enjoyed the week at Jeppe – especially since I didn’t have to hang around in the cold at the end of the day and bash out a newspaper report – the great games and incredible players just kept rolling on, for three days flat.

And on Saturday the SA Schools and SA Schools A teams were announced. They are dominated by Western Province, quite rightly – no-one comes close to them at this level. The release of the names came while the “main” game was in progress, which was rather bizarre timing. It confirmed what we all knew anyway – that these teams are selected almost entirely before the Craven Week begins. Certainly some of the choices made had little to do with performances at the tournament.

There were, for me, two highlights to that announcement: the appointment of Katleho Lynch as SA Schools head coach and of Jimmy Jimlongwe as manager of the A team. I’ve known both of them for a long time.

 Katleho is as committed and dedicated a rugby man as you will ever get. He is a student of the game who has written some quite brilliant opinion pieces on strategy and coaching. He is young and sometimes gets over-excited, but you get the idea that his players always come first. He is going to be a great of the game in time.

Jimmy is a servant of the game. I’ve seen him manage Free State rugby and cricket teams unselfishly at interprovincial weeks down the years. He was famous for a number of years for donning full Cheetahs playing kit and leading his team onto the field at the Craven Week. He is being rewarded for that sort of dedication now.

Above all, they are both good men, kind and courteous. They are what the adults involved in running sport for children should be like. They richly deserve all the honours that come their way.

My sporting highlight - WP (and SACS) hockey

 

My sporting highlight of the week? …. It’s interprovincial season, with the hockey IPTs played last week and the Craven Week coming up next. The U18 Academy Week is in Joburg so I get to go and watch, which will be a nice hour or two out in the winter sun and, for me, a bit of nostalgia.

Looking back on the U18 boys hockey tournament, you have to marvel at the performance of the Western Province team. They beat Southern Gauteng 3-1 in the A section final, the same scoreline as in the pool game between the two earlier on and they were, to my admittedly untrained eye, at a different level. That Southern Gauteng side had swept everyone they met aside, but they were comprehensively outplayed, both times.

WP were duly rewarded with seven representatives in the SA School side that was announced after the tournament. They also have two in the SA Schools B team and five in the U17 high performance squad, which is just about everyone in their squad. They also produced the goalkeeper, defender and striker of the tournament. You can’t get more dominant that.

Six of those seven SA Schools A team players are from SACS as are two in the B team. I don’t much believe in those schools rankings you see on the internet, but it’s clear that they all have it right this year when they rank SACS as the top boys hockey team in the land.

Southern Gauteng did have the consolation of having their captain, Jaydon Brooker make the SA Schools team, and be named player of the tournament. He was undoubtedly the standout individual player there. The Southerns B side won the B section and they will be back in the A section next year.

Roll on Monday and the rugby ….   

 

Picture: WP Boys Hockey Facebook

The Grant Khomo Week embarrassment

 

I wonder if SA Rugby is a little embarrassed that, on the day when some of the big shots from World Rugby were in town for the U20 Championships, their Strategic Transformation was exposed for what it is – the enforcement of a compulsory racial quota in the teams playing in its youth weeks that is about numbers and skin colours only, that has little to do with really transforming the game.

The fact that is was Western Province that fell foul of the regulations at the Grant Khomo Week and had their U16 team were pulled out of the prestigious “main game” because they did not have the required number players of colour in their match day squad, is the perfect illustration of how absurd it is to claim transformation success on the basis of having more black boys that white ones in junior elite teams.

The Western Cape is a region where rugby, rather than football, is the sport of choice at many rural and township schools. That’s been their strategic advantage ever since these quotas were introduced. Their pool of black players pool is so much bigger, and they can almost always pick their teams on merit without having to consider the quotas. Finding themselves in the situation they did this time was very unusual. If SA Rugby were really concerned with strategic transformation and not just ticking the race boxes on elite team sheets, they would have acknowledged that the Western Cape is one area where they don’t need to worry about demographics and they would have, under the circumstances, let the boys play the game they deserved to be in.

There is no real strategic transformation plan, however. That would involve real development at schools level. It would require duplicating the successes of the Western Cape around the country. Which would require patience, lots of selfless hard work by coaches, fields, facilities and money. It’s easier to just insist on 11 black faces in all the provincial team photos, without doing anything to help make that possible.

And if the provinces don’t obey, they stamp a heavy foot on them and take away the deserved glory from the players in the offending team – black and white.

World Rugby, under ‘Game Participation’ on its website, says the following:

“Rugby has always been described as a game for all shapes and sizes. As the game evolves, World Rugby accepts its responsibility to ensure that, as the pinnacles of the game achieved through elite performance are driven higher, the grass root foundations of the game are broadened and deepened.

“There is a strong symbiotic relationship between the development of the game and performance: without one, the other cannot reach its potential.”

SA Rugby want the elite side of the game to flourish, and they want it to be predominantly black - which is right, given the demographics of the country – but they aren’t doing the necessary development. Instead, they are manipulating selection. I’d be embarrassed, if I were them, that World Rugby was there to see that for themselves.

 

We've forgotten how good the Kiwi players are

 

My sports highlight of the week? …. No schools rugby to go to on Saturday, so I spent the day in front of the TV. It started with the Super Rugby final from New Zealand. I haven’t watched much of that this year, and I’d forgotten how good their players are. Those Northern hemisphere pundits that are saying Ireland or France are a shoo-in for the Word Cup clearly haven’t been watching either – and then there are still the players at the other NZ franchises too.

Next up was the Golden Lions U18s vs the Valke at the Northern Union Bondedag, courtesy of SuperSport Schools streaming. It’s the final Craven Week warmup game and the Lions weren’t great (not until the last 10 minutes). The Valke, full of EG Jansen boys, led for most of the game against a Monument-dominated Lions side, which wasn’t surprising since EG Jansen beat Monument 41-17 a few weeks ago. You have to question how this year’s Monument side can have eight players in the team, and how on Earth Jeppe’s Euxace Kevani wasn’t considered good enough to make it – I know he isn’t an SA citizen and therefore doesn’t count as a ‘quota’ player - but he is the best centre in town, by far, this year and should have been a 1^st choice, on merit. Still, there are some great players in the team, and I’m hoping they do well at the Craven Week.

The commentators during the Currie Cup final described Free State as “everyone’s second favourite team” and that certainly applies to me. I’ve said before that I’ll always watch a Free State team play if I could, starting with Grey College, through the ranks, to this year’s team that won the Currie Cup. Free State has become a farm team for all the other union, that’s a tragedy and it makes their win on Saturday even better.

The Junior Boks battled to beat Georgia in their opening game of the World Rugby U20 Championship and they are disappointed, according to coach Bafana Nhleko, that a good sign, because the Georgians are good, and they are going to shock some teams in this tournament. Still, a win’s a win, and there will be some good games to watch over the next two weeks, taking us to the Grant Khomo Week, and then the Craven Week.

Happy days.