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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.

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