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Are there really no good under-18s north of Bloemfontein?

There’s been a bit of a stir about the composition of the 45-man under-18 squad that was named by SA Rugby last week. The group will be cut to 35 and it will be departing for Georgia on July 31st. Although it has been stressed that this is not an official SA Schools or SA under-18 team, it will, never the less be playing three “internationals” against the hosts.

Clearly, these are not usual times. The 2020 and 2021 school rugby seasons both did get going, but were both shut down soon afterwards. There was no Craven Week, or Grant Khomo Week last year and there haven’t been any this year either – although SA Rugby haven’t given up entirely on that yet.

Under those circumstances, you have to ask why such a squad was chosen at all. And you have to acknowledge that whoever was tasked with making the selection had no chance of doing it properly.

The thinking, I guess, is that we cannot afford to go into 2022 without a group of recognised elite junior players to make up the pool out of which the provinces can do their recruiting and from which the SA under-20s to play in the next World Rugby U20 Championship will be chosen.

There is, it seems, a good rugby relationship between South Africa and Georgia at the moment. They agreed to playing Test matches against us to prepare for the Lions tour and their under-20s were recently involved in a tournament in Stellenbosch featuring Argentina and Uruguay as well. It’s logical that, if they came here, we should go there in return.

So, there are all sorts of good reasons why that junior squad should be chosen, and one very good reason why it should not have been – it hasn’t been done fairly. There are seven boys from Paarl Gimnasium there, and six from Grey College. No problem with that, of course our top two schools will feature prominently – it would be that way in any year.

There are a further nine Western Province players in the group and three from Oakdale Landbou – so more than half of the squad are from Bloemfontein and the Western Cape province. They are all good players, I’m sure, and some of them have come through SA Rugby’s talented players programme.

There are two players from the Lions, and two from the Bulls, and smattering from the rest of the country. Again, I know it wasn’t easy to select the squad at a time when no-one’s playing and yes, the schools from the South smashed their woefully underprepared Northern counterparts at the preseason Monument and Affies festivals. But doesn’t that mean there are no good players north of Bloemfontein.

I don’t believe you can use those pre-season results as an absolute yardstick. I've been watching the Joburg Easter festivals, in particular, for 30-odd years and my observation has been that the teams that go into them without a few preparation games under their belts almost always come off second best.

Rugby is a team game - individual stars don’t mean much if the team as a whole is disjointed and doesn’t perform the unit skills effectively. In short, you cannot play your first games of the season against some of the top schools in the land without a few warmups beforehand. That’s what happened back in April.

The schools from the South will probably have ended the season with the better records, if there had been one. And Western Province may well have dominated the Craven week, like they almost always do, but that doesn’t justify choosing such a significant junior team from the schools around Cape Town, and from Grey College and casting everyone else aside.

There’s no way you can expect success in the future if you only consider half the country when you identify for the first time the best players from this particular generation. More importantly, the players in every corner of the land deserve the same opportunities, That’s clearly not happened here.

If it could not have been done properly then perhaps it should not have been done at all. 

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