Tag: ajax cape town

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.

The Return of the Double Header

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Twice the fun – well, sort of.
Football Friday returns to Cape Town tonight with the PSL Double Header at the Cape Town Stadium: Vasco da Gama v Supersport United at 6:00pm and Ajax Cape Town v Kaizer Chiefs at 8:45pm and which is expected to get a crowd of forty… forty-five thousand. I’m quite excited about going along to watch, but nowhere near as excited as my son, who has been talking about nothing else all week. He’s been begging to go back to the stadium since his first visit to watch Portugal and North Korea in the World Cup. I would have loved to have taken him to the Bafana Bafana v USA game in November but the 9:30pm kick off time was prohibitively late. (Although, given the level of excitement in that encounter, he probably would have slept through it anyway.)

Sadly, given his age and usual bedtime, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to stay for much (if any) of the second game, but that won’t bother him since I haven’t told him that the second game is on. Clever daddy.

It also gives me the opportunity to put this photo of the stadium on here, taken during the World Cup quarter final between Germany and Argentina last July, which combines my love of things football, things Cape Town and things sunset all in one well-organised collection of pixels. Brilliant.

It also reminded me that I now understand the apathy amongst some people when it came to the idea of Football Friday – the practice of wearing a football shirt on Fridays in the lead up to the World Cup – as Cricket Friday has come been launched. Cricket Friday is the brainchild of the Lead SA initiative: the same people who told us that driving with our headlights on would reduce road accidents by 30%, only to be told that those stats came from Sweden, where it’s dark for 6 months of the year and 75% of all RTAs involve moose, which are notoriously photophobic.

While I’m all for supporting the national team (as long as they’re not playing England), Cricket Friday doesn’t really work, initially  because the alliteration which made Football Friday so catchy just isn’t there (in fact, since there are no days beginning with C, they might as well just give up now) and also because Football Friday came on the eve of the biggest thing to hit SA since democracy, whereas Cricket Friday comes ahead of five ODI matches between SA and India, one of which will be washed out tomorrow.
It’s not quite the same.

However, while tomorrow may be Cricket Saturday (see the problem there again?), today is definitely Football Friday and Alex and I will be enjoying an early evening hot dog and ice cream at the Waterfront before heading to Block 225 for some Vasco action.

Cape Town derby

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It’s the Cape Town derby match tonight. It might not have the glitz and the glamour of the Merseyside or Manchester derbies, the passion of the Sheffield or Tyne & Wear clashes or the complete lack of interest of something or other in Wales, but it’s our derby and there’s pride and points at stake here too.

Last time these two met at the Cape Town Stadium, it was an absolute snorefest. 120 minutes of midfield nonsense and then a quickfire 6-5 win to Santos from the penalty spot.

I’m hoping for much better this evening. Ajax are the firm favourites on current form, having won 3 from 3 in the PSL this season – and they’ve been playing some great stuff. History is with Santos though, who did the double over the Urban Warriors last season.

Plenty of promise, no guarantees. That’s football for you.
Still, if all else fails, there’s always the local bars to retire to. And they serve beer.