Theo Garrun Talking Schoolboy rugby

  The rugby season is passing in a flash. We are already into the midyear exams break and the Craven Weeks teams are being announced, and the fixtures for the first two days of the week, which takes place from July 4 to 9 at Rondebosch Boys’ High School, have been released. The Craven Week, once the crown jewel of youth rugby in the country, and the envy of the rugby-playing world, is looking a little frayed around the edges. It never happened in 2020 or 2021 because of Covid-19, but before then the long-term sponsor of the various Youth Weeks, Coca-Cola, had pulled out and SA Rugby was unable to find a replacement. There was even talk of the week not happening this year because of financial constraints. It’s on however, and we should be grateful, although SA Rugby will only be financially supporting the Craven Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo Week and the others – the Academy Weeks and the under-13 week - will take place at the expense of the parents. The question is, how d...

  Jeppe 3rd vs Benoni High 1st One of the criticisms of professionally run school rugby programmes is that they absorb so much of the available funding in the school and channel it into the 1 st team, and the other A teams, that there’s little over to fund the rest of the programme. It happens in keeping with the ethos that winning games is the whole point of the exercise. Wins mean ranking points on the weekly published lists that are so popular with just about everyone except me – and no one cares what I think. There are different ways of measuring success and, unfortunately, the performance of the 1 st rugby team is regarded as one of the most significant. School rugby teams have come along in leaps and bounds. The top coaches employed by the elite schools have introduced cutting edge skills and tactical techniques, supported by science-based physical preparation, nutrition, sports psychology etc. All of that costs money and it has undoubtedly resulted in standards of play...

  Were you at the game on Saturday? I was, along with, I’d guess about 12 000 others. You couldn’t get a mouse in at Jeppe. The stands, the koppie, the surrounding trees, every bit of grass around the field held spectators dressed in red or black and white, and there must have been another 1000 or so who were behind them, without a view of the field, but happy to be part of the atmosphere. It was a special edition of one of Joburg’s oldest schoolboy rugby derbies – KES and Jeppe have been playing each other since 1935 and Saturday’s 27-26 win for the Reds was their 60 th against Jeppe’s 27. It was special, for me anyway, because it was back after the two-year Covid gap and that was enough. The size of the crowd, and the good cheer and civility on display make me think many others felt the same way. On their records going in, not many would have expected Jeppe to win, but after conceding two tries early on, they lifted themselves and sheer passion, bravery and determinatio...

Picture: Rapport, from Frans Lombard's Facebook Page My posting of this picture on Facebook earlier this week caused a bit of a fuss. It was taken at the Primary School section of the Wildeklawer festival by freelance photographer Frans Lombard, who posted a cutting featuring it on his Facebook page. He was, rightly, proud of the fact that he had one of his pictures appear on page 3 of the Rapport last Sunday. The caption on the photo translates, roughly, as “Out of the way, Vleis is on the charge!” Frans Lombard is the nicest of all the long-lens men that I used to come across regularly in the corners of school rugby fields back when I was in that game. He is a brilliant photographer and this is a stunning image. My misgivings about it have nothing to do with Frans. Snaps are just that – split second captures. They freeze the instant and the context, the past and the future, are not part of them. Among the comments to my post were two from journalists I know and respect....

  Picture: Martin Ashworth Photography, from the Michaelhouse Facebook page I have often confessed that sometimes I’m a terrible hypocrite in these weekly meaningless rants of mine on the state of schools rugby in the country. I accept that I shouldn’t be condemning the professionalisation of schools rugby programmes and then enjoy watching the top schools teams play so damn much. And I should also admit that I know those teams have almost all been assembled by recruiting players from other schools, far and wide. I’m against professionalisation because it’s sometimes uneducational. It’s based on winning as the dominant value, which doesn’t leave room for teaching the other valuable lessons that sport is supposed to do. And I disapprove of recruitment because, while it may be good for individual children, it’s leaving a desert out there and the game is dying everywhere but in the strongest rugby schools. The problem is that those practices work. The schools that employ them pr...