Skip to main content

Why do Western Province have two teams at every rugby week?

 

My chirp the other day about the unfairness of Western Province having two teams in each of the Craven, under-18 Academy and Grant Khomo Weeks, met with the expected disdain from people south of the Great Karoo, and the issue quickly pivoted to the real injustice in schools interprovincial rugby: the continued inclusion of players from the three Paarl schools – Boys High Gimansium and Boland Landbou – and Stellenbosch’s Paul Roos Gimnasium in the Western Province teams.

The two issues are tied together. The inclusion of multiple WP teams in the Youth Weeks is being justified on the grounds of the excellence of the schools and the number of good players produced, yet the four consistently top schools are actually in the Boland region, and they contribute the majority of the players to the province teams, year after year.

It’s a matter that has been raised many times, including by me, and I’ve been castigated for raising the same old issue over and over, implying that because it isn’t new, it isn’t wrong.

No-one can really explain why it is this way. Some say it originally had to do with Dr Craven, and ensuring a pipeline of players for Stellenbosch University and the WP senior sides. Others, more ominously, offer a political explanation: the winelands grandees, historically, weren’t keen to mingle with the coloured folk who attended and worked at the schools on the other side of the Berg river so they aligned themselves with the older schools in Cape Town.

The schools in question participate in the competitions of the Boland Schools associations in every other activity, sporting and cultural, and their learners represent Boland at various interprovincial tournaments, in large numbers.

The argument for keeping them there in those other sports doesn’t seem to apply to rugby. Western Province has become the strongest schools rugby province and, since the Craven Week is now unashamedly about winning and no longer about the traditional Craven Week values, there’s no way it’s going to change any time soon.

There was a year – 2001 in Rustenburg – when the Paarl Schools were told to play for Boland. It was during the United Schools Sports Association of South Africa (Usassa) period when the Department of Sports and Recreation were trying to extend the model of centralised control of school sport that existed in the schools that were not for white learners to all schools. There was even talk of insisting that all interprovincial tournaments should be run according to the nine official provinces, which sacred the hell out of many, including me.

Usassa, naturally, found out that there weren’t fabulous coffers to loot after all, and that running things well took hard work and plenty of volunteering, so they quietly disappeared. So did the new Western Cape arrangement – WP lost two out of three at the Rustenburg Craven Week, and the Boland players were back in blue and white the next year.

All of which, some are saying, is why it’s absolutely fair that, now when there are only 16 teams playing in the Craven Week (there was a time when it was as many as 32), two of those are from one province.

No-one can quibble with the fact that Western Province is consistently the best. They are back in the Craven Week “main game” again this week – the seventh time in the last 10 years – and they have plenty of players who are going to be named in the two SA Schools teams. And many of those will be players of colour, which is very important, and part of the ongoing WP success story.

What we have to accept, I guess, is that the Craven Week is now, values-wise, pretty much a professional rugby tournament. It’s all about winning, and it follows SuperSport’s agenda – which is where the money comes from.

There’s no room for sentimentality in a professional, win-at-all-costs, philosophy. Neither are airy-fairy notions like tradition, educational values, or acting in the wider interests of the game considered important.

That’s why the Craven Week is, in effect, a made for TV knockout tournament these days. And no-one wants to watch mass participation sport on TV. Its all about the best only. And its why Western Province can have two teams in every tournament, while players in other parts of the country lose out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lots to enthuse about last week

It’s going to be tough deciding on a single highlight of the week gone by, so can I list a couple of what we used to call “briefs” in my newspaper days instead? It’s really about looking out for “gee, that was nice” moments in the area of school sport, mainly, and there were quite a few last week. Peta Kaplan turned 70, and she has been a swimming administrator for most of those years. She ran primary school swimming in Joburg when I met her and then became involved in Usassa and later the Gauteng Education Department as a sports development officer. She drove the agenda of transformation and accessibility to all, hard, which many of those who were running the sport at school level, me included, found uncomfortable. But she was right, of course. She has dedicated her life to sport for children and to swimming in particular. She is a tiny woman but also a giant. Happy birthday Pete. Jeppe put 670 boys and 75 teachers on 15 busses and sent them to Durban to compete against Westvill...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's rugby trials time, and I don't miss the cold

  My school sporting highlight of the week? It’s more a time of year, rather than an event, and I love it because of the memories it stirs: provincial rugby selection season. When the first chills of winter begin to bite, as they have this week, you know the Craven Week trials are on. I spent 10 years on those selection panels and the one consistent memory of those times is that it was bloody cold. On a typical U18 trials day the final game will kick off at around 5.30pm – sunset – and you’d have been on the side of the field in places like Alberton, or Krugersdorp, or, worst of all at UJ, deep in the valley and next to the Westdene Dam, all afternoon, steadily cooling down. We’d whinge, but I used to look forward to it all year, and from year to year.   It wasn’t easy. Trials are definitely not the best way to pick a team and, as the years passed, the task was made more difficult because racial quotas had to be met – it’s much worse now. And you’ll never please everyone...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another derby, another great day, much like the last one

  Much of what I’m going to say here I said last year this time. That sort of repetition used to be a no-no, back when I was newspaper reporter. But I’m not one anymore, and what I experienced on Saturday at the King Edward VII School vs Jeppe High School for Boys rugby derby at KES was so similar to what happened at Jeppe in April last year, that you really couldn’t tell the story differently this time around. Anyone who was there – and anyone else in Joburg who might have wanted to go to the game wouldn’t have found a spot to watch it from any way – was treated to the same spectacle; a riot of colours (mainly red), a cacophony from the stands and, on the field, the same passion and commitment and skills levels. Those skills, admittedly were less than perfectly executed at times, but if you are going to hold that against those 17 and 18-year olds, under that pressure, in that cauldron, then you were obviously not one of the 9 000-odd people shoe-horned into the school on Satur...
Post a Comment
Read more