Trail of the Lion King

The Southern Hemisphere rugby championship had been decided in New Zealand’s favour the previous weekend and so there was nothing official at stake in South Africa’s game against the All Blacks. It was still a clash between the top two teams in the world though and with less than a year to go to the World Cup it was bound to be competitive.

I’d watched last year’s game on the telly not long after arriving in the country and was determined that this time I’d see it live. So determined, in fact, that I’d booked our hotel near the Ellis Park stadium ten months in advance and then carefully checked the ticket selling site for weeks until they went on sale.

Our hotel in Johannesburg was one of those trendy ones, situated in what looked like a former factory and with bits of art everywhere. It was in the Maboneng Precinct which is a small area full of hipsters and the sort of cafes where they like to spend their time. Mind you, once you went beyond the area defined by beards, outsize spectacles and crap hair hidden by crapper hats it was an altogether different story.

Urban renewal stretched for no more than a block or two and it was only a short distance to the sort of streets where you could imagine Starsky and Hutch ploughing through cardboard boxes in their cars.

With the game not kicking off until five we had time for lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant. The food was pretty good although we had to wait ages for it to arrive. No wonder they are so skinny.

Outside our hotel.

At four o’clock we set off for the match. It was only a twenty minute walk to the stadium as we were able to use the railway underpass to come out close to our gate.

Jen had her bag searched by a security fella, who on discovering my camera told her that she wasn’t allowed to take it into the stadium. I think he may have been looking for an easy life as when I raised an eyebrow he suggested a compromise whereby we took it in to the stadium but didn’t use it. Fair enough.

Ellis Park.

We were inside the ground forty minutes ahead of kick-off, which you would think would be sufficient for two or three leisurely pints. Not so. The fifty odd thousand capacity crowd all seemed to be queued up at the bar and we just had time to grab a couple of beers and take them straight to our seats.

Pre-match pints.

I’d deliberately bought tickets in Row A of the upper tier, thinking that the seats would be high enough up to see the play unfold, whilst being at the front of the tier would mean that nobody would be sat in front of us. If only it were that straightforward.

We shuffled our way around the stand before realising that the rows werent the way I’d expected and Row A was actually the very back row, as far from the pitch as it were possible to be without being sat on the roof.

It was like being in the away end at Newcastle.

The crowd was a little more partisan than you’d usually see at the rugby to the extent that the haka was booed. A bit disappointing really. I’m used to South African rugby fans booing and whistling when the opposing team takes a penalty, but booing the haka escalated it to another level. Show some manners!

South Africa on the attack.

And the game? Well, South Africa built up a decent lead and then as they inevitably do the All Blacks pulled it back. It was looking like a respectably narrow defeat for the hosts until replacement fly half Pat Lambie kicked the winning penalty from inside his own half with a minute to go. I wonder what his nickname is? I hope it’s Lambieie.

The last minute kick from beyond half-way drops over the bar.

With the South African fans staying behind to celebrate we escaped the crowd and headed back to the Maboneng Precinct for more of the beardy people and an evening in a Senegalese restaurant.

This weekend saw the start of the Southern hemisphere version of the Six Nations Rugby Championship. It’s just four nations taking part down here though, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Argentina. It seems a bit harsh on the likes of Fiji and Western Samoa, but I don’t imagine they bring much to the table by way of telly money.

I like the inclusiveness of the northern hemisphere Six Nations tournament, particularly the insistence that, despite being crap at rugby, Scotland and Italy can continue to participate so that the fans of the proper teams can enjoy a weekend in Edinburgh or Rome.

The 2014 competition kicked off with a draw between New Zealand and Australia which I watched on the telly whilst Jen and I had lunch somewhere. The other fixture of the weekend saw South Africa host Argentina at the Loftus Versfeld stadium in Pretoria and so we popped along to watch that one live.

We’ve been to the rugby at Loftus Versfeld before and so I now know how it works. There’s a small bar inside the ground, but you can‘t take your drinks away from it. Far better to drink on the field outside and then head in just before kick-off.

Outside drinking.

I’d bought tickets for the stand nearest to the outside bar and shortly before kick-off we went in through gate eight to our seats in Row A of the upper tier. They were fine but our view was slightly obscured by a safety railing and so next time I’ll probably go for Row B.

The Argentinian national anthem was largely ignored by the crowd, most of whom continued to chat away indifferently. The South African tune was better received with quite a few of the home fans joining in. I’ve listened to a lot of different anthems lately and have concluded that most of them are absolute bollocks. Why do we bother with them?

If we are going to keep on with the nationalistic nonsense then lets at least update it a bit. I’d quite like to hear The Jam’s ‘Liza Radley’ sung before England matches. Weller seems a pretty good example of Englishness to me, can you imagine a packed Twickenham and a line of twenty-three burly players bellowing out the rising crescendo of the last couple of lines?

“She’d kiss my face and say love means nothing at all,

She’d kiss my face and say life means nothing at all”

Maybe just me then.

The rain started as the anthems finished and unfortunately our front row seats in the upper tier were beyond the shelter of the roof. Luckily the game was nowhere near sold out and so we just moved upwards until we were under cover. As the rain got heavier and the wind blew it inwards we kept moving further back. Eventually we were perfectly placed to the extent that any further back and we’d have felt the rain from behind.

The view from in the dry.

My mind wandered back to an Scotland v England clash at Murrayfield that my friend Paul and I had been to a few years ago. We’d hiked up Arthur’s Seat on the morning before the game and had been caught in similar torrential rain. As we were only in Edinburgh for the day we had no spare clothes and had to pop into Jenners for a complete new set each.

Our seats at the ground that day were exposed to the elements and once the rain returned we decided to skip the remainder of the game and clear off to watch it in the pub instead. No way could we have turned up soaking wet for a second time at Jenners.

Arthur’s Seat – Possibly the wettest I’ve ever been. Except for in the bath.

My mind also wandered to the feral kittens that live beneath our decking. I wasn’t sure if they’d ever been rained on before. If they had, it won’t as been anything like as heavy as this rain.

I’ve taken to feeding them tins of pilchards, which strikes me as somewhat indulgent when you consider that at twenty rand a tin, pilchards wouldn’t be something that a lot of the locals could afford to buy to eat themselves.

To tell the truth, I’d feel awkward giving tinned pilchards to random locals and have even less desire to watch some African fella eating them on the patio. I enjoy it when the cats turn up for their tea though.

There’s four altogether, plus the parents.

Anyway, the game. The heavy rain made ball handling difficult and standing up even harder. South Africa opened the scoring with a first minute try and then the sides traded a couple of penalties each in a 13-6 home win.

View from the back of the stand.

We stayed until the end in the hope that the rain would stop and thankfully by the time we left it was down to the odd spot of drizzle in the air.

Last Saturday tea-time I needed to be at the airport to pick up Jen as she returned from the trip that she’d taken to the US whilst I was in Brazil. Quite handily I’d noticed that there was a Currie Cup rugby game going on in nearby Kempton Park and since I was going to be over that way anyway, I thought I’d go along.

Whilst I had the address of the Barnard Stadium, my sat nav had never heard of it and neither had the blue dot on my phone. Fortunately I spotted a grandstand as I was driving around and when I got up close I was relieved to see I was at the right place.

It was ten rand to park my car in a nearby field and then thirty rand for a ticket.

The ticket office

My ticket was number 486, but it didn’t look as if there were anything like that number of people inside the ground. I’d estimate that there were around two hundred spectators which I thought wasn’t too bad considering that it was absolutely bloody freezing.

I’ve been getting a bit complacent with the winter weather here. Whilst it’s generally below freezing as I drive to work in the dark in the early morning, by mid-day the temperatures are usually up around 20C. In fact, I’d only worn a coat on this occasion so that I’d have a pocket to put a camera in. It’s as well that I did, or it would have been a short visit.

I’m getting geeky about tickets these days.

The big grandstand that I’d spotted from a distance was supplemented by uncovered terracing to either side of it. There was also terracing around the other three sides of the stadium, although very few people were watching the game from those areas. I’d missed the kick-off due to my problems in finding the stadium and Valke were already 7-3 down.

The view from low down.

I recognised the name of the visiting team, Boland Cavaliers, and remembered that I’d seen them get hammered at Swellendam in March in the Community Cup. I’ve not really grasped the eligibility requirements to enter the various competitions but I’m confident that the Currie Cup is a higher standard than the Community Cup, at least in the latter stages.

I’d also liken the Currie Cup to the English FA Cup in that it has a great history to it but now suffers from the priority given to Super Rugby in the same way that winning the FA Cup ranks somewhere below qualifying for the Champions League or even avoiding Premier league relegation for some teams. However, it does give a chance to sides like Valke and Boland to qualify for a game against the big boys later in the season.

The view from higher up.

The pitch didn’t look ideal for rugby, with very short dried out grass that was so lightly coloured that the lines were marked in red. I’ve seen greener cricket wickets. Maybe the groundsman was worried that the dry pitch would catch fire if the grass was kept any longer.

Roadside fires are commonplace this time of year. A stray cigarette or a discarded bottle will lead to whole fields burning down to stubble. I quite enjoy driving past these fires and will usually wind a window down to better appreciate the heat and smell.

When I was a kid, the local vicar would often dump and burn wreaths on a big pile of hay at the back of the vicarage. I’ve no idea if the hay was his, but it would smoulder away for ages. If ever we saw this we’d always try to stamp it out. No idea why, but we did. Often to the point where the plastic soles of our shoes would melt. These days though, I’ve usually got grown-up stuff to do and so I have to leave the fields to burn.

The main stand.

In the second half I left the main stand and had a walk around the rest of the ground. The terracing to the other three sides of the pitch had a strange overhead structure. It was as if someone had decided to put up some shelter but then lost interest before the roof went on. It looked ideal for growing vines, which would at least provide some shade at certain times of year. Maybe some wine too.

Boland on the attack.

Boland continued to add to their lead throughout the second half until a last minute consolation try for the home side cut the final deficit to 35-20, giving the impression that the game had been that little bit closer than it really was.

It’s that time of the rugby season when the Super Rugby pauses for a while and we get a few international matches. Wales and Scotland are due to make short visits to South Africa later in the month but the first fixture for the Springboks was a non-cap game in Cape Town against a ‘World XV’.

As the match was scheduled for one week after the final matches of the European season I’d initially had high hopes that Jonny Wilkinson or Brian O’Driscoll might make the trip for one last game before retirement. They didn’t though. In fact, I didn’t even see any speculation that either of them might make an appearance. I’m not sure that I’d have been so scrupulous had I been the promoter looking to sell tickets.

Jen and I arrived in Cape Town late on the Saturday morning, perfect timing for lunch at the waterfront. The forecast had been for snow which wasn’t something that I had contemplated when I’d booked everything up a few weeks earlier. I always expect the Western Cape to be warm and sunny. As it turned out, the forecast was wrong and the weather was just as I’d assumed it would be.

Our hotel  had been preserved as far as possible in the style that it had been built one hundred and twenty years earlier. This potentially caused a problem as nowadays most guests expect en-suite facilites, something that wasn’t so important in the late nineteenth century.

I think I’d have just linked the bedroom to the bathroom with a door. Perhaps a Victorian style door. That’s just me though. What they had done instead was to knock a hole through the back of a wardrobe. I’m glad I wasn’t busting for a piss when we arrived as I doubt I’d have thought of opening all of the cupboard doors in the hope of finding a secret passage to the bathroom.

“I’m just going for a dump in the wardrobe, dear”

Whilst I was disappointed that there wasn’t a secret underground tunnel to Newlands stadium that you accessed via a revolving bookcase, it was easy enough to just follow the crowd ten minutes up the road. Not many of the fans appeared to be going directly to the game though, most of them being easily sidetracked by the prospect of a car park braai.

It’s almost compulsory.

We were an hour or so early at the game but without having any braai equipment of our own we went in and took advantage of the stadium catering. The temperature had dropped a fair amount from lunchtime and it was probably too cold to be drinking beer. It’s rugby though and that’s what you do, so I had a few anyway.

Foodwise, there wasn’t much going on. I suppose they expect that everyone will have eaten in the car park. There was a biltong (dried meat) stall though that seemed to be doing good business. South African rugby draws most of it’s support from Afrikaners and I’ve a feeling that biltong does too. I don’t recall seeing anyone selling biltong at a football game over here. Perhaps that’s why you rarely see white fellas there, the prospect of having to eat their belt and shoes at half-time being too much for them to cope with.

Better than a Wagon Wheel, I suppose.

In theory our seats were decent ones. They were down the side, beyond the 22 yard line and towards the back of the lower tier. We’d even bagged seats on an aisle to make trips to the bar easier. The only downside was that we were under a low overhang from the tier above and it blocked out the view of the sky. I could still see even the highest up and under kick, but I like to see the sky too.

Mind you, had the forecasted snow materialised I imagine I may have been a little more grateful for the cover. Despite the lack of sky, I liked the old-fashioned look of the Newlands ground, with stands that appeared to have been built at separate times and with a small standing section behind each set of posts.

I cropped the overhanging roof out, but you can see its shadow.

The World XV didn’t have many names that I was too interested in apart from England’s Steffon Armitage. The English policy of not selecting players who turn out for French clubs means that this might be the nearest he gets to international rugby for a while. He did ok, as did the rest of his World XV side early on.

View from a bit lower down.

It wasn’t to last though as South Africa cancelled out the visiting side’s advantage by half-time and then ran riot after the break with another four tries in the second half. The game wasn’t of the highest quality, but that was to be expected with the minimal preparation time afforded to the World XV.

Perhaps one of the Super League teams would have provided better opposition. Or maybe a northern hemisphere club for a bit of variety. How about, say, the Heineken Cup winners, Toulon? I’d have got that last Jonny Wilkinson appearance then.

Bloemfontein is a five hour drive from where Jen and I live in Gauteng and if I thought sensibly about it, it’s probably a bit too far to travel to for just an overnight stay. Thing is though, I’d seen that there was a First Division football game taking place on the Saturday, followed by a Premier league match on the Sunday.

What made it more attractive was that the First Division game was between the bottom two teams, Roses United and Blackburn Rovers, teams that when the inevitable relegation to the Second Division happens may as well have vanished from the face of the Earth.

With that in mind, we set off early for Bloemfontein. It wasn’t a particularly interesting drive, plenty of open spaces with not much going on in them. Jen spotted some giraffe in the distance but I saw nothing more exciting than the odd bit of roadkill.

After five hours of driving I’d had enough and the prospect of continuing on another half an hour to the Kaizer Sebothelo stadium at nearby Botshabelo held little appeal. Or more specifically driving there and then driving another half an hour back into town after the game held no appeal. It was time for Plan B, which was to check straight into our hotel and then walk the few hundred yards to the Free State Stadium for some Super Rugby instead.

Free State Stadium.

The hotel that I’d booked us into advertised itself as being inside a zoo, with a view of elephants through the room windows. We didn’t see any of those, mainly because we had a big tree outside of our window blocking the view, but also because I don’t think there were any elephants.

We had a look through the window at the end of our corridor and were rewarded with some sort of nondescript bok with just the one horn. And I don‘t mean one horn like a unicorn, I mean one horn because the other had fallen off at some point.

The situation was redeemed by fighting squirrels. There were three of them, although I suspect just the one was the troublemaker. The hotel would have been better off advertising them rather than elephants as I was tempted to move to Plan C and just watch the squirrels scrap it out for the rest of the afternoon.

“Get into ’em”

Good as the squirrels were, we set off for the rugby and after a walk through a shopping mall that seemed a lot further than the hotel had claimed, we arrived at the Free State Stadium. I asked at the ticket office for tickets in a drinking stand with shade. “No problem“ she said and promptly sold us two sixty rand seats in the sun.

Even with tickets, it wasn’t easy to get in and we were turned back at the first gate we tried on account of my camera. Apparently it was too big. I wouldn’t care, but it’s not some big professional effort. It’s not even a proper DSLR, it’s just a poxy bridge camera.

We politely accepted the decision and made our way along to the next gate where we avoided the bag search. There’s always a way around these little hurdles.

After discovering our shaded seats were in the sun we found an alternative spot in the shade and waited for the teams to emerge through a guard of honour provided by a dozen bikers. I bet the groundsman loved that. Maybe they could have farmers with their ploughs next week.

Ideal for the playing surface.

Anyway, with the game underway and a beer in my hand everything eventually felt right with the world. For those interested in the stadiums, this one was built in 1995 for the Rugby World Cup. It also staged half a dozen games at the 2010 football World Cup, including the game where Germany beat England 4-1. We were sat at the end where Lampard’s disallowed ‘goal‘ happened.

We were supposed to be sat in the stand to the left.

We’d seen the Chiefs the week before in Pretoria and they’d looked a decent side on that occasion. They struggled in the first half though  as the Cheetahs, who had never beaten the Chiefs, seemed to be able to score at will.

The game looked over at half-time with the home side 34-10 ahead.

A sole first-half try for the Chiefs.

It was a different story after the break as the visitors gradually clawed their way back into the game. At one stage the Chiefs had reduced the deficit to a single point before a couple of Cheetahs penalties gave the home side a seven point advantage.

The Cheetahs were still seven points up with just thirty seconds to go on their own line out. Instead of killing the ball and then booting it out once the hooter went, they somehow contrived to lose possession to the Chiefs who kept the ball alive for another three minutes before scoring under the posts.

The view towards the other end.

The easy conversion gave the Chiefs their second last-ditch draw in a week and resulted in a stunned silence as the crowd left the stadium. We made our way back to the hotel where there were still no elephants and the squirrels seemed to have made up with each other.