Category: sport

Fire

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Quota video time and since there’s no decent football on tonight due to the plethora of international friendlies tomorrow, I thought that I would remind myself of the Premiership by giving you the theme tune of the international feed for that league, Kasabian’s Fire.

There’s a South African link as well, since the video was shot just up the road in picturesque and sleepy Piketburg and was probably the biggest thing to hit the dorpie since the N7 was built. It’s not every day that some boys from Leicestershire decide to pop over and hold up the bank with guitars as weapons. Don’t press that panic button or I’ll riff you to death.

Kasabian’s tenuous link with football and television don’t begin with this theme song, however.
Who could forget that they provided the music for the Sony Bravia ad featuring Kaka and a giant zoetrope?

Not you, I’m sure.

Last football at the Cape Town Stadium this season?

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It looks like tomorrow’s game between Ajax Cape Town and Supersport United may be your last chance to see football at the Cape Town Stadium this season. As the Ajax website states:

This is probably the last football game at the Cape Town Stadium for the season due to the numbers of events lined-up for the Stadium so we urge our fans to come and enjoy the “Gees” with us before we move to other football venues within the Mother City.

Which is sad, because nothing really matches the Cape Town Stadium for watching football. Instead we’re going to find ourselves at windy Athlone or tumbledown Newlands. And it’s also ironic that we can’t watch football in our “white elephant” football stadium because it’s so booked up for other stuff. Whingers, take note.

Anyway, Ajax are going out with a bang with a full on Family Day experience, so if you were erring on the side of staying at home –  don’t.
Tickets from Computicket are priced at R40, R60 and R80 and there is going to be plenty there for the kids, including an inflatable 5-a-side court, the Coca-Cola Gig Rig and a warm-up match between the Cape Legends and the local media.

I will be taking my boy along and then there will probably be ice cream for at least one of us at the Waterfront afterwards.

Gates open at 13:30, the warm-up match kicks off at 13:40 and the (actually rather important) Ajax game starts at 15:30.

Don’t miss out!

Big Boat coming

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If my sources are correct – and my sources are very rarely wrong – then at about lunchtime today, the Queen Mary 2 should be heading into Cape Town for a brief stop. This won’t be her first visit to the Mother City – she was here back in March last year.
Although no longer the world’s largest cruise ship, she remains the world’s largest ocean liner. I wondered if an ocean liner was a bigger version of a pond liner, which is one of those plastic sheets you put down to make an integrated frog haven and drowning hazard in your back garden. But apparently not.

According to Wikipedia:

A cruise ship is a passenger ship used for pleasure voyages, where the voyage itself and the ship’s amenities are part of the experience, as well as the different destinations along the way

whereas:

An ocean liner is a ship designed to transport people from one seaport to another along regular long-distance maritime routes according to a schedule.

So now you know. And this particular ocean liner is heading into the seaport of Cape Town after crossing the South Atlantic from the seaport of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the seaport of Montevideo in Uruguay. Tomorrow evening, she will set sail for the seaport of Durban, passing the really tiny village of Port Elizabeth on the way.
From there it’s a completely unhectic schedule of Mauritius, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Phuket, India, Dubai, what’s left of Egypt, Italy, Monaco, Spain and then back to New York via Southampton.

Hellish life, hey?

I’ll be popping down to the Cape Town harbour to get a couple of pictures on my way to the football tomorrow, so look out for them. In the meantime, you can look out for the 15-storey, 151,400 ton, 345 metre long boat next to the Waterfront.
I doubt you’ll miss it.

Great er… “weekend”…

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What an amazing weekend for Cape Town sports fans.

There’s another football double-header at Cape Town Stadium, with Vasco da Gama up against Golden Arrows and Ajax Cape Town taking on Moroka Swallows – that’s tonight at 6pm and 8:45pm.

Then there’s Pro 20 cricket at Newlands (that’s Sahara Park Newlands to you and me), er… tonight at 6pm.

And then, if football and cricket don’t interest you, you can watch the Stormers take on the Lions at Newlands (that’s DHL Newlands to you and me). That one kicks off – predictably – tonight at 7pm.

The rest of Cape  Town’s weekend is completely sport free, although there is some sort of fashion parade at a local racecourse tomorrow.

But seriously – can’t these organisations (and in saying this, I’m assuming that there is some sort of organisation involved) talk to one another? I might have liked to do two, if not three of those matches, but I’m unable to because they’re all at the same time!

This will provide further ammunition for those who say that the Cape Town Stadium is unsustainable when a less than sustaining crowd turn out for the footy this evening. But those who might have gone to the footy (and then somewhere to some other sporting event on another day) are now going to some other sporting event on the same day.

It’s like organising Danny K at the Bellville Velodrome and Kurt Darren at Grand West on the same night that U2 are playing Green Point.

Bono is going to be justifiably disappointed if Cape Town spreads herself so thinly again.

UPDATE: But sing ho for a Cape Clean Sweep:
12,000 at the football to see Vasco win 1-0 and Ajax win 2-0 (and go top of the league).
13,000 at the rugby to see the Stormers win 15-0.
15,000 at the cricket to see the Cobras win by 5 wickets.

Good work, lads.

Best Safety Video Ever

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They play this video on the big screens before games at the Cape Town stadium. Fortunately, I managed not to have to ask the man in yellow anything last night.

There was a giant octopus around, but apparently he became distracted by happy hour on cocktails at the Radisson on the way up from Granger Bay.

Thanks @futurecapetown