The Craven Week is losing its shine

 

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 did it go wrong? I don’t pretend to have all the answers. As far as sponsorship goes, I guess it’s no longer an attractive product. Organisations are still willing to part with their money. Standard Bank renewed its commitment to schools festivals after there were rumblings back in 2020 that it was going to be their last year. They supported the three Joburg Easter festivals, and the one at Kearsney, and they were also at Grey High, and they added the St John’s Basketball Festival to their list.

The Craven Week is an inter-provincial tournament and, it seems, there is more appetite for events involving individual schools. The money put into events like the Wildeklawer long weekend and the Noord-Suid festival in Pretoria shows that to be the case.

The Craven Week, with it’s history and quaint, Danie Craven-inspired traditions, has taken a dive in popularity and relevance. Here are some of the reasons why I believe that happened. My opinions won’t be supported by some people, but I don’t think I’m far wrong.

1 The Craven Week has sold its soul to SuperSport.

It may change now, with the addition of the SuperSport Schools live streaming offer to the sports media world, but once SuperSport decided to make its Craven Week coverage a major production, the Craven Week's “old ways” were consigned to the trash.

The running of the show was gradually adapted to fit their requirements and schedules until, eventually they dictated the proceedings. The biggest manifestation of that, and the one that did the most damage, was the change from a festival to what is effectively, a knockout tournament. Whereas in the past, every team and player was made to feel welcome and special, in recent years it has become all about the top four or five teams.

The only prize at the week, Dr Craven insisted, should be a place in the last game of the week, and that honour was reserved for the two teams that played the most attractive rugby. That concluding game has become, and is now officially called, the Craven Week final and the finalists emerge from quarterfinals and semifinals over the first four days of play. Those matchups are made on the basis of previous weeks and the same teams, basically, appear in them, year after year.

The rest of the teams and their players only make up the number really, and who wants to watch them play on TV?

 And, because knockout rugby is about winning only, the teams approach those games accordingly, meaning that the two sides in the final are sometimes those who played the ugliest (but also the most effective) rugby.

Dr Craven was adamant that there should not be individual awards, and that representative teams should not be picked. Well, no televised match doesn’t have an interview with the MOM afterwards – so guess what has happened? The SA Schools team selection pre-dates the TV days, but the announcement of that team is a big part of the TV coverage these days, and it’s ensuing games are also broadcast live.

 2 An unrepresentative representative tournament

Let’s be clear, the Craven Week never was representative. In the days before rugby unity black players were not allowed to play there, so to say the teams were chosen on merit back then is nonsense.

Thankfully that’s no longer the case and there’s no question that the week has been enriched by the burgeoning black talent that has been given the opportunity to appear there. The game needed to transform and, when it became clear that there were those who were unwilling to accept change, measures had to be taken to force their hands.

Were the right ones taken? I don’t believe so. Instead of growing the numbers from the bottom up through effective development, which requires money and effort, it was decided to enforce quotas at the top, making the selection of players of colour compulsory. And then those number were increased steadily until, this year, they stand at 12 players of colour in each 23-man squad, with minimum of eight on the field at any time

Those numbers aren’t unreasonable in the context of national demographics, but they don’t match up to numbers actually playing the game in many provinces (although in others they do). There are no systems in place to grow the numbers organically though development, so, to meet the quota and to be allowed to play, players are brought in from elsewhere and provincial teams consist largely of players who were born and who learnt the game in other provinces.

It works in so far as the requisite numbers of black faces are there in the team pictures and SA Rugby gives its blessing, but it’s a far cry from the days when Craven Week teams were selected from players who were born and raised in the region.

It’s become a franchise, not a provincial tournament, and it’s difficult to get excited about that.

 3 Not a nursery anymore

The Craven Week brochure each year has a long brag list of provincial and national players who appeared there. At one stage it was called the best rugby nursery in the world and the universities, provincial unions and rugby academies were there identifying and signing up players.

Nowadays, the signing up has been done long before. The unions all have high performance programmes starting with much younger players and by the time they are under-18s most of them are already committed. The Easter festivals, and the Wildeklawer tournament are the places where any talent that has slipped the net is identified.

Again, it makes perfect rugby sense, but the rugby-lovers pastime of identifying players at the week and picking your SA Schools team no longer exists.

4 The top schools are still pretty much white

Go onto SuperSport Schools and watch the top five or six ranked schools in action. You don’t need the fingers of too many hands to count the players of colour on the fields. Because each provincial team has to be over 50% black, it means that some of the boys you see won’t be at the Craven Week, even though they are good players in very good teams.

So, while Grey College are the top school in the land, it doesn’t follow that Free State will dominate at Craven Week. 10 or 11 Free State players have to come from somewhere else (some will come from the Grey 2^nd XV). Likewise, Affies and Garsfontein will only supply half of the Blue Bulls team between them.

Western Province and the Golden Lions have appeared in more “finals” that any other teams in recent years and that’s an interesting story. Any notion of a quota doesn’t really apply in the Western Cape. There is a long tradition of rugby in the rural and township areas down there and their team is chosen on merit – with the best of those players of colour coming from the traditional, formerly white-only schools.

In Joburg it’s different. There is very little rugby played in the black communities, so most of the good players of colour are brought in from other parts of the country. They go to schools like KES and Jeppe and the local private schools where they are exposed to top class facilities and coaching and play against good opposition. The Lions don’t have too many schools in the top 10 of the national rankings, but their players of colour are top class. That’s why they have always been a factor at the Craven Week in recent years.

Playing in the Craven Week is, however, still a great honour, the pinnacle of a schoolboy player’s career. The boys going to Rondebosch have worked very hard and they deserve to have a wonderful time there. There are all sorts of lessons to be learnt for them, and that’s really what it is all about.

It’s just not the jewel in our rugby crown that it used to be.

Craven Week Fixtures

Monday July 4 – EP v Griquas, Sharks v Valke, WP XV v Boland, WP v Border.
Tuesday July 5 – Pumas v Limpopo, Griffons v Leopards, SWD v Cheetahs, Golden Lions v Blue Bulls