I’ve been at more of these Easter Rugby festivals than most. I don’t know of many who have been around longer than me and I’d have to go back to the 1980s when the Saints Festival was the only show in town to recall a day like Saturday at the Standard Bank King Edward Easter Festival.
I asked around and no-one could tell me if there was a record crowd in (the ticket sales reconciliation will only be done later on), but it seemed that way to me. I couldn’t see how any more people could have been squeezed in. Someone (one of those long-term volunteers I spoke about on Thursday) asked me afterwards if KES vs Paarl Boys’ High was a good game – he couldn’t see a thing from where he was standing, he told me. He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get anywhere near the field, I’d wager.
Then there was the rugby, particularly the last four games of the day. For me, there were two things that I particularly loved about them: the refusal of the underdogs to lie down; and the quality of the black players on the field. Hudson Park, Ben Vorster, Parktown and KES were never the favourites, none of them played that way, and the crowd roared its approval. And all of those teams fielded players of colour who dazzled with their flair and technical ability. They exposed the myth that this is a game for big strong Afrikaner boys only. That’s not something we should still be talking about, but if like me, you were at the Noord-Suid Festival last week you would have seen what I mean.
Hudson Park ran Northwood close. The East London school is one of those that is regularly looted by the recruiters from other provinces, and Northwood, allegedly, is a school that does a fair amount of recruiting from outside its province.
The Joburg chapter of the Queen’s College old boys achieved legendary status, in my eyes, when they stood in the teeming rain supporting their side at last year’s festival. They were there again on Saturday – in much better weather – and they were rewarded when their team produced the most attractive rugby of the day in beating a Ben Vorster team that was plucky and courageous.
Next up was Parktown vs Selborne and given their relative standings as far as recent rugby fortunes go, you would have expected Parktown to cop a big one. Not so, they refused to go away and stormed back late in the game to close the gap to 17-23 down. It was stirring stuff that set the crowd up for the daring that was to come next.
Then the big one: the hosts, KES, against Paarl Boys’ High. It should have been a mismatch and I, and others I’m sure, questioned the wisdom of even putting the teams on the same field. The KES boys weren’t listening to us, and we didn’t take the effect of that massive crowd into consideration, and the weight of the history of Reds teams not stepping back in the face of adversity on that field, particularly when they were playing downhill in the second half, as they were on Saturday.
Paarl won 10-8, but with a little more luck for the home team, it could have been different. It was a thriller, a game which will be talked about for years, up there with other Easter Festival classics that only old timers like me will remember: Maritzburg College beating a Bishops team that looked invincible in the very first Easter festival – at St Stithians in 1985; Grey College’s Pieter de Haas pulling a rabbit out of the hat to see his side beat KES at the same festival, one year later; Scott Spedding leading St John’s to victory over Paul Roos Gimnasium at one of their early festivals, among others.
Saturday was a glorious day – earlier that morning I had been questioning the value of carrying on with school rugby extravaganzas like this. By Saturday night I wasn’t asking anymore.
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