Tag: cape town stadium

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!

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

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.