The time cricket festival is done, but the lessons will live on

 

The St David’s Fasken Time Cricket Festival ended on Sunday and it was a run fest.

There were no fewer that 18 centuries scored in the four days, over 50 half centuries, and literally thousands of runs in total.

The conditions played a big part in that. The wickets were flat and lifeless, having seen no natural moisture since April, the outfields were dry and threadbare. So, the bowlers got no help, and any shot beating the infield went to the boundary.

The two-day “time” format must, however, get credit too. There’s so much limited overs cricket played these days that it would have been a welcome change for the quality batsmen to get themselves in and select their strokes without the pressure of having to get on with it.

The idea of giving schoolboys the opportunity to play longer format cricket comes from Dave Nosworthy, director of cricket at St David’s, and he is unwavering in his belief that real cricket lessons are learnt far more effectively in longer games.

I think there was enough evidence on show over the weekend to show that is true. Sure, the second round of games all ended in draws, which could be seen as a reflection on the captaincy. At lunch on the final day all the games were poised for sporting declarations and exciting run chases. And there were one or two teams that were prepared to take a risk, but in the end, I guess, four days of toiling under an unseasonably hot Joburg sun, in their 1^st games of the season, took its toll and no-one had the energy left to produce fireworks at the end of it.

But, as I heard said from many quarters over the four days, the event was about learning more than results and there were lessons learnt in that final session too. I came across an example of that while snapping away at one of the games. I got into a conversation with two parents who told me that when the team were complaining about the size of the target set for them and the number of overs they were given, the coach told them that it was of their own doing. If they wanted to make a game of it, he said, they should have bowled the opponents out earlier, and not dropped so many catches.

That’s a lesson you don’t learn in T20 cricket – and the schools their sons are at are the national champions in that format of cricket.

The wizened cricket professional, or the teacher equivalent of him, plays a vital role in ensuring that those lessons are learned. There were a number of those sorts of men at St David’s over the weekend. Men who have been around for years and who probably taught the bright-eyed youngsters who are coaching the teams now how to play. I saw, for example Mike Bechet at the Jeppe games, Adi Norris was there with St John’s, Jeff Levin at St David’s, Wim Jansen at St Stithians and the Noordheuwel pair, Werner Jacobs and Morne Heunis. And Nos, of course, was talking to all the players and all the coaches, all the time.

Cricket is the greatest educational game and it’s having those sorts of educators around that makes it so.

 

Appreciating your opponents is part of the great game

 

Someone told me that as we get older, the time we have spent watching cricket is subtracted from our age. He’d read it somewhere, he said. You can imagine one of the great philosopher reporters of the game, Neville Cardus or John Arlott, perhaps, or even our own Charles Fortune, saying that.

I’ve tried, but I can’t find the reference. I think it could be true though, and I was reminded of  it when I spotted Harry Shapiro at the side of the field at the St David’s Fasken Time Cricket Festival on Friday. He’s 82 now, he told me, and still coaching and running clinics for coaches. I remember doing the Cricket SA level 1 coaching qualification in my first year of teaching some time during the last century and the bit about teaching spin bowling was handled by Harry.

It was good to see him. When I asked him how he’s doing, his response was to criticise the field placings in the game he was watching, “that’s a T20 field, not a two-day one,” he said. That’s the response you’d expect from someone who has spent a lifetime in and around the game.

Few games have more customs, quirks and traditions than cricket has. A unique one is to show appreciation for what your opponents do. Applauding milestones reached is an example, as is a batsman acknowledging when he has been beaten by a really good ball, and fielders going across to congratulate a batsman when he leaves the field after a good knock.

You see less of that on TV now in these times of cricket on steroids, but there was enough of it on show over the first two days of this festival to show that it’s still being taught at the sorts of schools that are playing here.

And to reinforce that lesson, the organisers have introduced a great custom. “Man of the match” awards don’t really belong in a festival, but one of cricket’s peculiarities is that it’s a team game made up of individual performances, and those individuals should be recognised and encouraged.

So, the thinking was, why not let the players of the opposing team decide who the standout player in the other team was? The Fasken Purple Cap is the result. At the end of each day’s play the captain presents a cap, to be worn the next day, to the player who has impressed his team the most.

You can tell by the body language at those hand-overs that it’s something the players are really enjoying.

It’s been two long days at the cricket already, and there are still two to come. But at least I can subtract them from my age as I get ever older.

 

It's about sitting together in the shade, as much as anything else

 

The idea of playing two-day cricket matches is something new to the 180-odd boys who are at St David’s Marist for the Fasken Time cricket festival. I overheard two of the coaches, both ex-players, discussing how these players won’t get to experience it again, unless they get to the semi-pro level of the game.

Cricket is unique among team games because in no other one do you get to sit around with your team mates for such extended periods, watching the action. This two-day format has increased that time period, it’s a longer opportunity to bond, and speak the trash that cricketers do.

And education, in the end, is all about setting up situations in which young people can learn lessons. The best educators are there, guiding the conversation – lightly – but letting their charges learn for themselves.

That’s cricket, isn’t it? I walked around the grounds at St David’s on Thursday – and you don’t realise how big the Inanda campus is until you tramp from one end of it to the other – and saw at every field the batting teams sitting together in a shady place, ribbing each other, shouting encouragement at the batsmen out there and generally soaking up the socalisation lessons that the game teaches. And sitting with them, slightly to the side, were the coaches, smiling to themselves, butting in from time to time, and quietly teaching life lessons in a unique way.

That’s why it’s worthwhile going to the trouble and expense of setting up an event like this one. As much as learning the cricketing skills and strategy that the longer game teaches, the boys spend hours together learning from each other, and from the men who are with them who, remember, believe it’s important to give up so much of their time to coach them.

The St David’s headmaster, Mike Thiel, at the festival opening breakfast on Thursday, bemoaned the fact that football has appropriated the name “the beautiful game”, he suggested that cricket should call itself “the great game”. He’s not far wrong.

 

There are lessons to be taught and learned

 

The Fasken Time cricket festival at St David’s Marist was last held in 2019 and the results of the, then, 10 two-day games broke more or less even between results and draws.

 Time cricket, in essence, means that the game is limited only by time – a minimum of 110 overs must be bowled in a day and the game time will be extended to accommodate that – but the results of the matches will be determined by the target set and reached, or not reached, at the end of the two days.

 Under those circumstances drawn games are a distinct possibility. Last time out, if memory serves, some of the draws were due to poor captaincy: sides batted too long and declarations came too late to make a win possible. Some of the draws were honourable, though. That can happen when a team is in trouble and through grit and application their batsmen manage to stick around and avoid defeat.

 That’s one of the things that make cricket unique. Two days of play can end in a draw, and that can be really exciting. This festival follows this format because the belief is that the players can learn all sorts of lessons – cricket and life lessons – by being exposed to those sorts of situations.

 At the end of the day, this is school sport, and all school sport should be educational, first, foremost, throughout the contest and after the game is won or lost. And I don’t think any other game provides as many opportunities for lessons to be taught and learned as cricket does.

 Education is about building character – and that’s what cricket’s all about. It’s why the Aims and Format for this festival includes in its introduction the following lines:

 "We ask that Coaches and Managers understand that we encourage some really tough and ruthless cricket – but remembering to always play the game in the appropriate spirit whilst always respecting one’s opposition and putting the game first. Lastly, we encourage teams to play it hard in the middle – but knowing full well that there is absolutely no reason to cross any line."

 Cricket, I think, is the only game that is a metaphor for fair play and decent behaviour. Say the words “it’s just not cricket” and most people will know what you mean. It’s an expression of disapproval used when the rules have been broken and, in its narrow and wider meanings, that refers to the actual laws and the unwritten spirit of the law.

 Take the “mankad”, for instance. It refers to a batsman being run out when he ventures outside of the crease at the bowler’s end. According to the laws, he is out of his ground and certainly out. But the spirit of cricket requires the bowler to warn him once before removing the bails. To do otherwise is just not cricket.

 Any teacher or coach responsible for the running of a school sport programme who doesn’t have in mind that the most important task is to teach children to behave honourably and according to the values and ethics that are included in both the laws of the game and the ephemeral “spirit of the game” is not, in my opinion, doing his or her job.

And a cricket coach who teaches a bowler to mankad a batsman, or for that matter, tells a batsman that it’s OK to steal a yard backing up because there’s no chance that he will be mankaded, is out of line.

 Playing two two-day games over the next few days will present many opportunities for teaching young people to go out into the world, doing good because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s just not cricket to do otherwise.

Fixtures

1^st game September 1 and 2 - Jeppe vs Waterkloof (Baytop Oval, St Stithians), St David’s vs Paul Roos (La Valle Oval, St David’s), Maritzburg College vs KES (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs Lions XI (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), St Johns vs Clifton (Gier Oval, St David’s), St Andrew’s vs Noordheuwel (La Rosey Oval, St David’s).

2nd game September 3 and 4 - KES vs St Andrews (Baytop Oval, St Stithians), St David’s vs Clifton (La Valle Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs Maritzburg College (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), Noordheuwel vs Lions XI (Gier Oval, St David’s), St Johns vs Waterkloof (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), Jeppe vs Paul Roos (La Rosey Oval, St David’s).

Why 2-day cricket games are good for schoolboys

 

The Fasken St David’s Time Cricket Festival is back after a two-year Covid-induced break, and it has been increased to 12 teams – 11 schools and a Central Gauteng Lions Invitation XI.

The idea was the brainchild of Dave Nosworthy, director of cricket at St David’s and it started off with six teams, playing two two-day matches each. There has been such a demand to play in it that they have increased the numbers and additional fields at St Stithians are being used this year.

The games take place on September 1 and 2; and September 3 and 4.

You have to ask, given the popularity of the shorter formats of the game, and the convenience that goes with getting them over and done with quickly, why it’s wise to have schoolboy games that last two whole days, and why so many schools are eager to play in them?

There are all sorts of good reasons for exposing schoolboy cricketers to declaration cricket, and to get them playing longer forms of the game, says Nosworthy.

“The batsmen,” he says, “need to learn to spend more time at the crease, without the limited-overs restraints. The bowlers need to be able to bowl longer spells, and be brought back later on. The players need to get a feel for proper cricket, with matches that go on, day after day.”

Limited-overs cricket has become quite formulaic, Nosworthy says. You do certain things at certain stages of the game and there is no room for innovation, and no requirement to apply cricket thinking to unfolding situations on the field.

“It has shown in the performance of our U19 teams in international ‘Youth Tests’ that the players lack the skills required in the longer game,” he said.

“Exposure to time cricket is important to let young players experience what it’s like to bat all day or being on your feet two whole days,’ he said.

“Captains must learn that sometimes you have to be prepared to lose in order to win. They need to be patient, to be brave and to set targets that give them a chance of winning. Those lessons that can’t be taught in limited-overs cricket.”

The 12 captains and 150 odd players that will be at St David’s next week are entering the unknown. It’s going to be a great learning experience for them, and a lot of fun – guaranteed.

Fixtures

1^st game September 1 and 2 - Jeppe vs Waterkloof (Baytop Oval, St Stithians), St David’s vs Paul Roos (La Valle Oval, St David’s), Maritzburg College vs KES (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs Lions XI (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), St Johns vs Clifton (Gier Oval, St David’s), St Andrew’s vs Noordheuwel (La Rosey Oval, St David’s).

2nd game September 3 and 4 - KES vs St Andrews (Baytop Oval, St Stithians), St David’s vs Clifton (La Valle Oval, St David’s), St Stithians vs Maritzburg College (Dlamini Oval, St Stithians), Noordheuwel vs Lions XI (Gier Oval, St David’s), St Johns vs Waterkloof (Mc Gregor Oval, St David’s), Jeppe vs Paul Roos (La Rosey Oval, St David’s).

Danone is still on board and one day, hopefully, its Nations Cup will be back

 

I was at the St David’s Challenge Cup schools football tournament a few weeks ago and reflected on the all-round excellence of the event while, at the same time, bemoaning the fact that it is one of only a handful of tournaments at which football at this level (there were under-15 and under-19 teams there) gets its place in the sun).

It is, sadly, an elitist and exclusionary event. The entire ethos is based on the traditional way of organising sports at a certain type of school. I’m talking about schools that believe in mass participation, in encouraging their learners to play many different sports, and in playing the same set of traditional opponents, year after year.

So, the schools at the St David’s tournament are the same ones, with a very few exceptions, that have been there every year since it started. Norkem Park High School, the runners-up in the under-19 section this year, are outliers – they aren’t a boys-only or a private school like the others – but they have been playing there all along.

Football at the vast majority of schools in the land is not run this way.

There is very little organised sport in most of the schools in this country. There are no quality fields or facilities at those schools, and no resources to provide them. The stark inequalities that exist between the haves and have-nots in our schooling system persist, 25 years into our new democracy, with its promises of changing that.

There are other priorities for what money is available for education and, somehow, sport is not regarded by the authorities as being an important part of the educational programme. That much was made clear by the response to the Covid-19 epidemic when a blanket ban was placed on sport at schools and no attempt was made to reinstate it when the schools were gradually re-opened later on.

That’s the context in which the St David’s tournament takes place. 

There are those, of course, who are dedicated to uplifting the children at those under-resourced schools through the medium of sport, specifically football. I was reminded of that the week before St David’s when I went to the DanUP Soccer Clinic at the Discovery Park center at the Wanderers. It involved some 50 nine to12 year-old boys, and a few girls, and it was laid on by yoghurt manufacturer, Danone. They were township kids, bussed in, and the idea was to give them a morning to remember, to give them some life-skills tips and some skills training from the Discovery Park coaches.

Danone, in the days before Covid, sponsored the Danone Nations Cup. It was an international under-12 tournament organised by the South African Schools Football Association (Sasfa). Sasfa had all sorts of problems, but at least it brought organised soccer to the poorest schools and to the remotest corners of the land. The activities were limited and the numbers involved in each school are small, but if it weren’t for Sasfa’s interventions there would be no sporting activity at all in many of those places.

Things went on hold in 2020 because of Covid-19 and the future is unclear, but before the lockdown Sasfa ran sponsored tournaments in five age groups. There’s pretty substantial prize money on offer, but no cash changes hands. Instead, the winning schools draw up a wish list of long term improvements that can be made at their schools and the sponsor pays for them.

The Danone Nations Cup was different in that the first prize there is participation in a World Finals tournament, with the winning school being sent to some overseas venue to compete against 90 other national champions. What made the competition special is that the original idea was that the participating nations shouldn’t send their elite youth champions to the World Finals but that the winners should emerge from some sort of “football for good” project in their countries.

Not everyone stuck to that, it seemed, but the Brazilian team, for example, used to come from a programme run in the favelos of Rio de Janeiro and the England representatives were not the under-12 academy team of one of the Premier League clubs but rather the winners of an inner city upliftment- through-sport project.

South Africa never sent its national champion team – there is no competition to determine who that would be anyway – instead, the Sasfa process has sent youngsters from impoverished schools in townships, and in the deepest of rural settings, to play on a world stage. It’s a shining light in an otherwise bleak sporting landscape.

Those tournaments were last played in 2019. I spoke to Emmanuel Marchant, managing director for Danone Southern Africa at the DanUp clinic and he told me that, because the Covid lockdown and its effect on the economy had affected them like every else, they have had to put the Nations Cup on hold for now. They have every intention though, as does Groupe Danone – their international mother company – of reinstating it.

“It’s in the company’s DNA,” he told me, “to make a difference wherever we operate. Education is the area we have chosen, through the medium of football, and we intend carrying on with it.”

That morning’s clinic, he said, was a small step back on that road.

But it’s not just football. On display at the clinic that Saturday was a tiny school desk, made entirely out of recycled Danone plastic yoghurt tubs, and a concrete block, amazingly also made out of used yoghurt containers. They will be used to build and furnish schools in South African townships.

“We have clever people behind that project,” Marchant said, “but more importantly, they are passionate about finding solutions to the problems facing the children. That’s the Danone way.”

There was enough evidence of that among the Danone people on duty at Discovery Park that morning. My prayer is that they will get the chance sooner rather than later to put all of that passion and innovation into a relaunched Danone Nations Cup competition.

The children need it back, badly.

Happy birthday to an old soul - Lucky Stylinaou

 

I saw on Facebook that it’s Lucky Stylianou’s birthday today.

I remember Lucky from my days at Wits University, and he had clearly been there a while when I arrived, which makes him older than me, although I don’t know what his age is exactly. But he’s an old soul, no question.

In my days as editor of the School Sport supplement of the Saturday Star I felt we needed to run a weekly column by a coach. I tried out a few and Lucky Stylianou, the former Kaizer Chiefs player and youth coach, who was teaching at Saheti School was the one that stuck.

It was a stroke of luck for us. For the next five years he sent us an article very week and it turned out he was far more than just a good technical coach, he was deep thinker about the role of sport in the development of children. His columns got a great response from readers. I know he has gathered the best of them into a book that hasn’t been published yet, it really should be.

One of the women who worked with Lucky at Saheti told me once that the problem with him was that, like most Greek men, he saw himself as a direct successor to the ancient Greek philosophers and he looked at the world though that lens.

I don’t know about that, but I do know that he has a philosophical, long-game view on winning and losing and an educational ethos that resonates with me perfectly.

It was an incident involving Lucky as a coach some years before, that was one of the events that stands out in my school sport memories. It was at a primary schools soccer tournament at Crawford College in Benrose. Lucky was there with the Saheti team.

The final, between two other schools, ended in a draw and was still deadlocked after extra time, so in the gathering gloom, it went into a penalty shootout, as the tournament regulations stipulated. At the end of two rounds of spot kicks the scores were still even so it went into a third, and then a fourth. By then the 12 year-old players were so emotional and nervous that the first four kicks were missed, and the fifth one didn’t even reach the goalkeeper.

Those children were clearly overwhelmed. Then an incensed Lucky stepped up out of the crowd. He called the boys off the field and told the organisers that it was enough. He reminded them that these were only children and told them if they had to award a cup, the teams could share it, but there would be no more penalties taken that day. They, somewhat shame-facedly, agreed.

It was quite remarkable. I became a Lucky Stylianou fan that day and it had nothing to do with the fact that he had played 250 games for Kaizer Chiefs.

A number of years later, Lucky invited me to attend a Chiefs game in a suite at Soccer City. The way in which he was welcomed there and the greetings and selfie requests he got from fans bore testimony to the impact he made at the club.

And on the way in, on the quiet, he dropped off a couple of bags of groceries to be handed to former team mates who had fallen on hard times.

An old soul celebrated his birthday this week.