Theo Garrun Talking Schoolboy rugby

My friend and colleague Jonathan Cook posted on Facebook today this picture of the main rugby field at Michaelhouse – Meadows. It’s great setting, and it prompted me to include it on the list of the most beautiful school grounds I have visited in my, yet to be (and probably never will be), book on my 40-odd years of watching school sport.   Here’s what I wrote after watching cricket there: When I went to the Khaya Majola Week at Michaelhouse in 2018 it was the first time I had been to the school. It’s a magnificent place – red brick buildings dotted around a forested parkland and immaculate sportsfields all over the place. The cricket week was head quartered in the Red and White – the clubhouse at the main cricket field and it’s a beautiful setting. The best of the fields, I thought, however was Meadows, the main rugby field, where there were also Khaya Majola Week matches played that week.   Without it’s posts and markings, it was difficult to see exactly where the ...

Interschool rugby fixtures got going at the weekend, under the shadow of a looming Covid-19 third wave and with many school rugby people, I’m sure, quite pessimistic about the odds of all school sport being called off by departmental decree should the rise in new infections suddenly take off again. We can debate the wisdom of that and wonder if the educational value of school sport is being taken into consideration when those decisions are made, but in the end the authorities, and schools, are going to err on the side of caution and that’s what they should do, I guess. There were fixtures called off last weekend – three in Gauteng, that I know of – and in all three cases there were a few isolated positive tests among sport-playing boys. There were no widespread infections, but I agree that there was an unacceptable risk of asymptomatic virus carriers going to another school and spreading it there. It’s a reality that we are going to have to live with, certainly all of this year and pro...

  The dominance of the Cape schools over those from up country at the Monument Centenary Festival and the Noord-Suid tournament at Affies over the last fortnight led to degrees of gloating and despair from supporters of the schools involved, and accusations – one publicly – that the schools from the South have broken the rules, and that they came into these 1 st matches far better prepared than their counterparts which indicated that they have been playing proper rugby matches on the sly for some time now. The sports director of Garsfontein wrote a letter to the editor of News 24 making the allegations and the online response to that consisted, predictably, of flat out denials and accusations of sour grapes and bad losing. I have no idea whether the allegations are true or not, and I guess we have to take educationalists at their word. I have, however, been watching these sorts of early season games – at the Joburg Easter festivals in particular – for 30-odd years now, and my ...