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The big and the small


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. They criticised the fact that the picture doesn’t show the context – the rest of the game, and “Vleis’” performance at the festival. He wasn’t the dominant bully that the picture suggests. I accept that and it’s unfair of me to assume that. But that’s the story the picture tells, and that’s the reason why the newspaper ran it, and added that appalling, aggressive caption.

Based on my incorrect assessment of the situation, I then went off about the unfairness of matching early-developing giants against regular sized kids in junior rugby games. Of course I know that those big boys are eventually dragged down by the sheer weight of the multiple tacklers who are hanging on to him and, yes, in their high school years the others inevitably catch up to them size-wise.

It’s not an original story. Go to the primary school Craven Week and you’ll see one or two really big men in several of the teams. I’ve coached such a player and he was just about the same size in matric that he was in grade 8, and nowhere nearly as effective.

I got a lot of support for my view that such uneven matchups aren’t educational and shouldn’t be allowed. I can’t offer a solution, though. I remember speaking to Clint Readhead, SA Rugby's medical manager, about it at the u-13 Craven Week at Glenwood a few years ago where there were two Vleis-sized specimens in action for two different teams.

That’s when he told me that SA Rugby had studied the New Zealand model of playing junior rugby according weight divisions, and decided not to go that way. From a safety viewpoint, their research shows that there aren’t many serious injuries arising from collisions between big and small players. Serious injuries occur in the scrums and scrums are, therefore, strictly regulated; and they occur in high-speed, dynamic situations, and those don’t usually involve the giants.

The other side of the coin – the older players who are as small as the babies – is more concerning, Readhead said. Clearly, a 16 year-old, with three or four years of playing experience, who is almost fully grown at a weight that would be the average in a team of 12 year-old beginners, has a big advantage, and if he is poorly coached and allowed to be mean-spirited, that can be dangerous.

That’s the explanation for why we don’t play according to weight. It sounds right, but it means we have these mismatches.

My real concern is the optics of that photo. It captures a disturbing situation. The caption doesn’t help, neither do some of the comments on Frans Lombard’s original post. One that sticks out translated into “you can see that tackler’s soul being knocked out of him”!

That’s someone’s child. And yes, I don’t know whether he looked back on that situation as a fun experience, and maybe it will make him a better player in the long run.

All I can go on is what was captured in the moment, and it doesn’t paint a picture that is good for the game, particularly not for the group who those who are battling to keep the game alive know are the most important people in that struggle – the mothers who have to allow their little sons to take up the game.

 

  

   

  

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