Stoked

There will be better photos taken of Newlands Cricket Ground, but there will be few better days for visiting teams than this.

newl

England piled the pressure on to SA with Ben Stokes lashing the ball all over Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs, as beautifully documented by Brian Micklethwait.
And that view, via England’s Barmy Army Twitter feed. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the view might only be improved by the removal of that factory behind the scoreboard. Until, that is, you learn that the ‘factory’ is actually a brewery, producing about a million litres of beer a day. And suddenly everything makes sense.

Because hey, we get thirsty in the heat.

P.S. I didn’t get tickets for the Test because of family stuff, but I have secured a few for me and the smaller 6000s to get to the T20 in February.

Stellenberg High School at Newlands

A bit of detective work has helped me find out which school was responsible for “those displays” at Newlands during the rugby on Saturday.

Step forward Stellenberg High School – brilliant.

sths   sths2
Amazingly, people seemed to be watching the rugby as well and there’s not much other documented evidence of their displays. If anyone has any better photos or videos of their performances on Saturday, please get in touch. Meanwhile, here’s an example of the kind of thing they were doing:

This is er… “flashing”: exposing your school blazer or shirt/blouse to “flash” black or white to make a design or symbol.
It seems that a) Flashing is a Northern Suburbs thing, and 2) Hoërskool Stellenberg are pretty damn good at it.

Dat line

The best bit of an otherwise forgettable weekend was probably watching the rugby on Saturday at the crumbling Newlands Stadium.

image
And while even the result of that was rather distressing, it was a good spectacle at times.

Take, for example, the arrow straightness of this Stormers defensive wall – aided by the try line – both of which were crossed soon after this photo was taken.

I can’t feel my fingers

The weekend in Cape Town kicked off with heavy rain from about 3am this morning (rather than 3am this afternoon, which makes no sense at all, obviously. My point is that it was 3am this morning, rather than any other morning).

It’s not like this wasn’t expected. One of the (many) good things about living here is that the weather is quite predictable. Stuck on the corner of Africa with literally thousands of miles of ocean almost surrounding us, it’s fairly easy to see what’s coming and warn us about it. And warned we were:

image

Wind, rain, swell – lots of each of them, which surely means a trip out with the camera tomorrow.

Currently, it’s 10.2C and the pressure is 997mb. The pool is overflowing and there are puddles all over my lawn. And with the wind increasing and the pressure still dropping, it seems like the worst is yet to come.

In the midst of all this, I have prepped with homemade soup, cottage pie, pasta “thing” and home-baked fresh bread. Looking good, then.
And then we’re off to Newlands to watch the rugby. Memories of the sleet at Italy v Paraguay in 2010 spring to mind.
I’d rather be in the stands than on the field, but right now, I’d rather just watch it on TV and enjoy my soup.