STRIKING IT RICH: Mixing auld lang syne with cricket and rugby

WHY THIS CAN STILL BE A TRAVEL DIARY

There’s been no travel since I went to Gqeberha to cover the Investec Champions Cup game in early December and spent three rewarding days at the St George’s Park cricket test while in the city, but it did get the juices for a multi-sport focus to this column flowing.

Technically, there has been some travel. The DHL Stadium, where the Stormers play, is not next door. Getting there to watch and write about the two Vodacom United Rugby Championship derbies and the more recent Champions Cup game did require some time in my Nissan Navara. Between 25 to an hour, the bigger number comes into play when there is heavier traffic, which is all the time over the Christmas season.

But even that latter time isn’t bad at all compared to the mission it was to get to Newlands when that was the headquarters of rugby in the Cape (and the country, actually, as for a long time the SARB and then SARFU offices were located in the same street). There are many old-timers who decry the decision to relocate to the stadium built in Greenpoint specifically for the 2010 World Cup, but maybe they haven’t been exposed to the user-friendly new venue.

NO POINT IN CRYING OVER A FIELD NOT BEING USED

As an aside, I keep seeing social media images of Newlands and the field, or the desert that is forming there, and somehow this is seen as evidence of neglect. Sorry, but that makes no sense - Newlands is no longer a rugby venue so it really doesn’t matter what the field looks like. No-one is going to play on it. As for the disrepair in the stands, if it is no longer serving the purpose it was built for, then it needs to be sold off and knocked down as quickly as possible.

Yes, there is always emotion in saying goodbye to a place that holds memories. Visiting PE a few years back, I took a walk past the ruin that was then the last vestige of the old Boet Erasmus Stadium that hosted so many famous international rugby matches. Having watched or covered so many games there myself, it was sad to see.

But life has to move on. If you go to Wellington in New Zealand and look for the old Athletic Park, where Gerrie Germishuys scored a try in the win scored by Wynand Claassen’s Springboks in the 1981 series and Pieter Rossouw did likewise in another South African win there 17 years later, you won’t find it.

Rugby there has moved on and the Westpac Stadium, or whatever it is called now (the locals know it as the Cake Tin), has long been the face of the sport in New Zealand’s capital city.

LIVING AT NEWLANDS CRICKET GROUND

That was a digression. Back to the point, mileage is clocked up to get to Stormers games, and Newlands cricket stadium, which please, please should never be knocked down, where much time has been spent over the past few weeks spread across the four days it took the Proteas to win their test against Pakistan and the MI Cape Town Betway SA20 home game against Paarl Royals.

Talking of Paarl, I am heading in that direction for the return fixture, to the town that gave us among others Springbok rugby players Chester Williams and Jean de Villiers and former Bok coach Peter de Villiers (sorry the list is way too long to be a full one), later today (Wednesday). So there may be an excuse for more of this next week. Book a day off work to read it, for you know these things can be long…

CHRISTMAS RUGBY DOES WORK…UNFORTUNATELY

Allow an admission here - I didn’t think Christmas rugby would ever work in this country. The big sporting event for years over the festive period was the Boxing Day test, meaning cricket, which used to be in Durban but is now in Centurion. Followed by the New Year test, always in Cape Town. Rugby? Well, that happened in this country between March and October when I was growing up, and in my first few decades of writing about the sport.

The two sports were played in distinctly different seasons back in the 1990s, when I started my sportswriting career at The Natal Mercury, to the extent that I could cover rugby in the winter and cricket in the summer. That was fun. Now it is much harder and you are almost forced into specialising.

It was actually pretty irritating that on the tight third afternoon of the Supersport Park test match, I had to drag myself away from the television to DHL Stadium to cover the coastal derby between the Stormers and the Sharks.

There, my hopes that this would be the last rugby game in this country to be played between Christmas and New Year were comprehensively and utterly dashed. There were more than 50 000 people there!! And while at Hollywoodbets Kings Park the words “full house” are distorted by all the advertising banners that eat up probably 25 000 seats, there was also officially a full house for the URC derby between the Sharks and the Bulls the previous week.

I’d argue that if you called it sport, Capetonians would pitch up in numbers to watch a five-day paint-drying competition. Being part of a number of people watching something just seems to be in the DNA of the people living in this region. There were full houses at the first three days of the cricket test at Newlands that started a few days after the coastal rugby derby too.

But Durban isn’t like that. They took away the Boxing Day test for a reason. The first test between the Proteas and Sri Lanka at Kingsmead looked like it was watched by the equivalent of a man and his dog. So getting people out in numbers to Kings Park, which also happened in the Stormers derby at the end of November, and the Exeter Chiefs and Toulouse Champions Cup games, takes some doing.

Yes, I do take the point that for the Durban Christmas derby, there’d have been many out-of-towners at the game. Just like there were probably many holidaymakers, and not only Sharks supporters from Durban, at the 28 December coastal derby in Cape Town.

I bumped into former Bok and England assistant coach Matt Proudfoot the day after the Stormers beat the Bulls in a Christmas derby a few years back. He told me he’d been at the game and had enjoyed the vibe but was a bit surprised at the attitude of the spectators.

“It was like no one cared that much who was winning,” he said.

Maybe there is a bit of that. My mates who are regular supporters of rugby and go to DHL Stadium for every game were out of town for Christmas, and there are probably many regular Stormers fans who would be at a derby played in March or April who don’t go in the holiday week because they are away.

Allow me to reveal my bias, which should really be obvious - like the local rugby players, I am not used to working at Christmas. Doing it for cricket all those years ago seemed right, for Christmas cricket was part of our culture even in the isolation years. Not rugby. But people voted with their feet. The outcome was unanimous. So it’s time for me to put up and shut up.

BOXING DAY AND NEW YEAR TEST HAD THEIR FORERUNNERS

There was mention there of the isolation years. Yes, old timers among the cricket fraternity might remember a time when the Currie Cup was the big thing in this country and Transvaal would regularly start their three-day home game at the Wanderers on Boxing Day. I say regularly because it wasn’t always the case, sometimes those games were scheduled for another date in December. But not often.

The late Mike Procter, when he was coaching Natal and I was writing about it, told me about how he’d grown used to having to leave his home in Durban at lunchtime on Christmas Day for the flight to Joburg and the Boxing Day start at the Wanderers. He did it as a player and then he had to do it as a coach.

What was even more regular than the Wanderers Boxing Day event, and was pretty much set in stone, was the forerunner of the Cape Town New Year test. Western Province would host Transvaal in a powerhouse match-up at Newlands that would sometimes start on New Year’s Eve if not New Year’s Day. Full houses pitched for those games. Living in Durban, though usually at that stage of the festive season camping with the family somewhere on the old Transkei Wild Coast, I would follow it on the radio.

The most memorable game was played in the 1976-77 season. Martin Young was the radio commentator who described the tense closing stages of a match that was reaching a thrilling conclusion.

The concept of one boundary making a huge difference to the balance of a three-day game was alien to me at that time (11 years old), but that was the case on that final evening of a match that ended with Province needing a six off the last ball and Transvaal needing one wicket.

Clive Rice, not yet captaining Transvaal as at that stage it was David Dyer who had the leadership reins, was the bowler. A young medical student named Robbie Drummond was the batsman, and from memory, he was either making his debut or had made his debut a few weeks previously.

He was an opener, so he must have been the in-batsman. Those who watched ‘Ricey’ will remember his yorkers, but perhaps Drummond was undone by the dilemma he faced - a six would win it, but blocking the ball would get the draw against WP’s biggest rivals for the log leadership at that point of the season.

You could almost feel the tension and the deathly silence described by commentator Young on the radio. And then came “And he’s bowled him!” Unforgettable no doubt for those who were there, and for those of us who listened.

THAT’S TEST CRICKET FOR YOU

The beauty of test cricket may well have been summed up for those of us who watched it wall to wall for a time over December, when England were in New Zealand, India were in Australia and SA were playing Sri Lanka and then Pakistan, by the events on the fourth afternoon of the third test of the Border/Gavaskar Series in Brisbane.

Australia had dominated the game, but rain had interrupted, and they were racing time in their quest to get the win they needed to take a series lead. For much of that fourth afternoon, it looked like they would be in a position to make India follow on. In which case it would be a big advantage for Australia and they’d have just over a day to bowl India out.

But the last few Indian batsmen dug in, and then the last pair produced a handy partnership amidst scenes of great tension to edge nearer the follow-on score. It seemed so unlikely but then, just like was the case when Marco Jansen and Kagiso Rabada were together playing for the actual win for the Proteas in Centurion a few weeks later, suddenly they were just a few runs away.

When they got across the line, meaning past the follow-on score, the Indian dressing room erupted like they’d won the game. Which in a sense they had. Or at least drawn it. Australia were the only team who could win it by that point but they weren’t going to win from a position where they had to bat again.

That’s test cricket for you. The battles within the bigger battles are so important and so absorbing. What is satisfying for me is the number of people who spoke about that Brisbane moment afterwards. When you see the empty grounds for test matches in this country outside of Cape Town and Centurion, where there is always palpable interest, you might think that format doesn’t have much support.

But it does. It’s just that a lot of people follow it now on television, or online. It does appear to mean more to people than the fast food entertainment style of the bilateral ODI and T20 series played outside of the World Cups in those formats.

Ask a cricket lover about the results of a particular test series or match and you might be surprised at how exact the recall is. Outside of that famous 438 game in 2006, you don’t get that in the limited-overs formats outside of World Cups (no, of course, I haven’t forgotten Allan Donald being run out in that 1999 semifinal or the rain misery that prompted the invention of Duckworth-Lewis in Sydney in 1992).

ODD FORMAT BUT THE CTC WORKS FOR CRICKET

There was understandable negativity from overseas when Marco Jansen steered the ball to the boundary to clinch the Proteas the cardiac-arrest-threatening two-wicket win over Pakistan that clinched them their place in the Cricket Test Championship final at Lord’s in June. Understandable because the Proteas never played top nations like Australia and England in the cycle.

But, as I argued when I got drawn into a debate on the topic in the comments section of the UK newspaper, The Times, it is surely good for cricket that a nation where the format is supposedly under threat has been drawn in, and that a nation outside of the ring-fenced trio of financially dominant nations that play each other so regularly - Australia, England and India - is not there.

The interest in the two Pakistan tests was off the wall, whereas that series would have been a bit ho-hum without the context of the Championship.

Sitting at Newlands on the first day, I was agog at how many people I overheard talking about how they were going to organise tickets for the final in London in June. How many tickets are there and how much money do people have? But that’s okay, for once the test team was getting the attention it should. And part of the reason this column has gone multi-format is because I want to go to Lord’s too…

NO PLACE FOR VEGGIES AND HEALTH NUTS

Okay, so I don’t know who decides what food outlets get to trade during cricket tests and Betway SA 20 games (where frankly the game is too short to spend half of it standing in a queue anyway). Or for that matter at rugby games. But for goodness sake, does it have to be so tough for people who are vegetarians or just health nuts?

“I just want to find some place that will sell me a salad or even a subway,” said one acquaintance who was circumnavigating the ground during a break in play in the test. And he was right. There used to be a great curry place, that did an excellent bean curry for those of that persuasion, that has disappeared since last season.

Being at test cricket, for those of you who haven’t figured this out, is my idea of nirvana. But does it also have to be Heartburn Country?

THE BUBBLEGUM HAS ITS PLACE - BIG TIME

In my last column of this nature, I likened the shortest format of what used to be known as the summer sport to bubblegum. You take your first few chews and it is wonderful, it gives you a heady feeling, but then after a while, there’s a sameness and you spit it out. Bi-lateral international T20 series are like that IMO. But not the Betway SA20.

This morning I got involved in a debate with a mate who, like me, considers test cricket to be the ultimate format of the sport. No, he wasn’t going to come with me to Paarl because “this IPL cricket is meaningless and is just about making money”.

Hello, making money is of course the on d’être for everything these days, isn’t it? But while that point is conceded, there’s massive benefits to the competition that go way beyond the fun that is to be had at the games, the atmosphere that is quite unlike anything else in the sport, and almost turns it into a completely different sport, and the role that it undeniably plays in attracting a new audience.

In the first season of the competition, I went to Newlands specifically to watch England fast bowler Jofra Archer in action, as well as other international stars like Archer’s England teammate Jos Buttler (MI City Cape Town were playing Paarl). But now I go to watch the many young local players who are profiting from being exposed to this level of cricket and playing alongside established stars.

Last season I watched Jordan Hermann, who at the time was just 22, bat well against an excellent attack that had, among others, Kagiso Rabada and Sam Curran in it. A few days ago, 18-year-old Lhuan-dre Pretorius scored 97 batting with Joe Root against an attack that included Marco Jansen and others, and then, although it was a much briefer innings, I was there to watch him play the Kiwi global star Trent Boult with consummate ease at Newlands.

Dewald Brevis was given a big rap in the first season, perhaps too big, but in the opening game this season, he emphatically squashed the theory he’s been pushed too soon with his exquisite innings in Gqeberha. He’s connecting with the Cape Town crowd, and that’s also the point - the next level down from international level doesn’t get the crowds it used to, so the up-and-coming players are being introduced to the bigger stage and the pressure that comes with it.

It’s all good in my view and it is why I would encourage anyone who hasn’t been to one of the Betway SA20 games to do so. You won’t be disappointed.