Talent speaks a language of its own. When professional sportsmen and women are sufficiently talented, they become global commodities who can choose where they want to play and how much money they want to be paid.
But if it is to flower in full, talent must be discovered, developed, nurtured – and kept.
South African sport can’t afford to compete with the salaries offered by overseas football, cricket and rugby leagues. This leads to many of our best players leaving the country to ply their trades abroad.
Commentators and analysts throw their hands up in the air and say there’s nothing that can be done about it because it is all about money.
This is a useful excuse when our teams do badly. Take Super Rugby, for example. We say we aren’t on the same level as teams from New Zealand because we keep losing our best players to Europe and Japan.
But it is not only about money.
If you count the number of New Zealand rugby players in Europe and Japan you’ll find just as many, if not more, as there are South Africans. So, what is New Zealand doing better than us, which enables it to maintain such high standards?
I would say it is because they spot and embrace the best talent on offer, both at home and in the region. Some of their better players go overseas, but there is a special spirit in New Zealand’s rugby that keeps most of the best insisting on playing locally.
The lesson seems clear: Learn how to fish and learn where the fish are. Then, cast your net as widely as possible to land a few of the most talented ones. Once you’ve found them, treat them as the special people they are. Nurture them. Keep them, and they’ll repay your faith.
But what do we do here in South Africa? Here we do not consider most of the fishing grounds, and when we do land a few big ones, we battle to hang onto them.
We battle to think out of the box. We battle to create something special that will lead to our most talented players demanding the right to stay and play in our country.
It’s not only about money. When our players return from overseas, they re-encounter the same environment that led them to leave in the first place.
There’s still something missing, an emptiness which was underscored by the recent Springbok trials match. While there was a relatively high number of players of colour in the two squads, the majority of them were products of the same small group of formerly white schools.
It still feels too exclusive, too unequal, too privileged…
And it raises questions as to how much of our best talent has never been seen – because we’ve not bothered to look.
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