The Gqeberha players will benefit hugely from their involvement in early-season tournaments during the holiday.
Matches at these tournaments would also have helped the respective coaches to look at the available talent and find the right combinations. There is great national interest in some of the prestigious tournaments and it provides significant exposure to the players.
There is also television coverage of selected matches. This means that solid individual performances will be picked up by all sorts of scouts and might just lead to a lucrative professional career.
The Mali Foundation teams, dominated by players from Ndzondelelo High in Zwide, were involved in two big tournaments. They played the very first match of the North v South Tournament which started on Friday in Stellenbosch against Parel Vallei.
Another Mali side did battle at the annual Grey High Festival which ended in Gqeberha on Monday.
Parel Vallei beat Mali 57-19 but the Eastern Cape boys will no doubt improve with many matches still to be played this year. One thing is certain – these Mali boys can entertain and they score spectacular tries regularly.
The challenge for the coaching staff is to give more structure to their play and jack up the defence, but still give the players the freedom to use their natural flair on attack to keep on scoring those tries.
Framesby also made an appearance for the first time at the North v South Tournament and, like the Mali XV the previous day, got the first go on Saturday.
Duineveld (Upington) wasn’t the strongest opposition, but the Gqeberha visitors made sure their debut at the tournament was a winning one. It is still early days but it looks as though Framesby is keen to play a more enterprising brand of rugby this year.
Under the captaincy of Eden Calitz (no 8), there was good variation in Framesby’s play. Speedy backs like Cole Hilpert and Damion Witbooi might just enjoy themselves this season. Raynhardt Brown (lock) was named as the Man of the Match in the 60-7 victory.
Grey High was involved in an absolute thriller on the first day of their festival in the main match on the Kolisi Field on Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t a high-quality match against Michaelhouse, but it was entertaining and went right down to the wire.
With 20 minutes to go, Grey was leading 28-16. The KwaZulu-Natal visitors came back with two tries in that period to level the scores. Michaelhouse missed the last conversion which could have given them victory, the game ending in a draw on 28-28.
Grey made plenty of unforced mistakes and their game management was poor, but there were also good signs to indicate much better is on the way.
