Cricket-season approaches

Kick off the season by watching the Cape Cobras play the Titans at Sahara Park on 12 November. If you’re planning on visiting Cape Town during our summer months – look out for matches being played at Sahara Park Newlands, and visit Ticketpros, a local site through which you can purchase tickets.

The photo was taken just behind a grass lawn called The Oaks at Sahara Park in Newlands during the last season.

GeekCricket action

Regular readers will know that I’ve been to quite a lot of cricket lately. This particular game was a little different, though. This wasn’t a test match, or an ODI, or even a Pro20 game.

No, this was GeekCricket – a glorious opportunity for those of us not playing to spend a whole morning laughing at our friends. Actually, these guys did surprisingly well for a bunch of amateurs, and I got the feeling that this might just become a more regular event. I hope so, anyway.

I got bullied gently coaxed into keeping score for part of the match, with a real scoring book and all. *excitement* Given that this is GEEKCricket, though, I sincerely hope someone will write a little piece of software to make scoring simpler next time around.

You can read a few updates on the game here, and see a whole lot of photos here.

AB De Villers stretching at Newlands

Don’t you find that you spend far too much time behind your computer screen? Ah, perhaps not you, but I certainly do. Many years ago (as mentioned yesterday) I was painting the town red on my skateboard, with the result that I had pretty okay leg muscles. I’ve found that over the subsequent years, with plenty of time spent sitting at my computer, these have atrophied and shortened to a point where I now regularly suffer knee and lower-back pain.

I stand in awe of guys like AB De Villers (the cricketer in the photo) – how does a man possibly flex like that? Well, I guess that the answer to my problem is to get off my butt and exercise those muscles. So, although I know that it’s not enough, I’ve begun stretching and strengthening my leg muscles in the mornings as part of my start-of-day routine, and I’ve also decided to walk up the five flights of stairs to my office instead of taking the elevator.

The challenge now is to keep on doing this. :-/

This coming weekend is jam-packed with things to do. On Saturday we celebrate our wedding anniversary, and Cape Town hosts the Two Oceans Marathon. Sunday we’ll be covering what will hopefully be an entertainingly inept group of “cricketers” at our first GeekCricket event, and then on Monday we’ll be joining thousands of people at the Coke Zero Fest, which is essentially 10 hours of live music.

Union Avenue and Paradise Road

Today marks an interesting sporting anniversary: 120 years ago today the very first cricket test match was played in Cape Town. The match was the second of a 2-test series; the first test was held in Port Elizabeth earlier in the month, and the second hosted at our very own Newlands cricket grounds. South Africa unfortunately lost both tests and the series to the then-better English team.

Union Avenue and Paradise Road are both part of the M3, a route normally taken by most people going to watch cricket at Newlands. The M3 is the major road leading from the City through the southern suburbs of Cape Town. It can be a little confusing, as sometimes people will talk of De Waal Drive, or the Blue Route, and mean exactly the same road. Let me clear up a bit of confusion by listing the various names given to parts of the M3. Starting from Cape Town’s side of the M3, we have: Buitensingel Street, Orange Street, Annandale Road, Mill Street, Jutland Avenue, De Waal Drive, Hospital Bend, Rhodes Drive, Union Avenue, Paradise Road, Edinburgh Drive and finally, Simon van der Stel Freeway (colloquially known as the Blue Route). Got that?

Reading the news

I can so relate to Mr Newspaper Reader in this photo (taken at Newlands yesterday). The vibe at Newlands is energetic. Cricket is interesting once very few hours. Still, I can’t say that you would ever find me at the edge of my seat whilst watching a match – especially a test-match – painfully unfolding.

As I’m sure you gathered from yesterday’s post, Kerry-Anne visited Newlands to watch South Africa battle it out with Australia. I, on the other hand, took the opportunity to stay home and catch up on an ever-growing and unrelenting task-list. I believe that the weather was perfect – although it could have been storming and raining for all I knew. I spent the day hidden behind this same screen I’m looking at now. How sad.

Bakers Mini Cricket at Newlands

Bakers Mini Cricket is a development programme aimed at introducing South African boys and girls of all races and economic groups to the game of cricket at a very young age (as you can see in today’s photo – look at the size of some of those shirts compared to the size of their occupants!).

Bakers Mini Cricket is apparently the longest-running sports development sponsorship in South Africa – they celebrated a quarter-century last year. Cricket South Africa says that over two million children have been involved in the Bakers Mini Cricket programme so far, including some of our top professional players, like Mark Boucher and Makhaya Ntini. You can read more about the history of the programme on the Bakers Mini Cricket website.

I spent a few hours at Newlands today, watching the Australian cricketers taking a bit of a pounding from the Proteas. During the lunch break the field was occupied by a whole bunch of Bakers Mini Cricketers, who entertained us with some of the most adorable cricket I’ve seen in a long time. We’ll be uploading more photos just as soon as we can finish processing them – and there’ll be a few of the bigger cricketers too, not just these teeny-tiny ones. (In the meantime, our photos of The Dirty Skirts in concert at Kirstenbosch are up – have a look and let us know if you spot yourself in the crowd!)

In case, you missed yesterday’s post, Cape Town Daily Photo has been selected as a finalist in the SA Blog Awards in three categories. If you think that CTDP is the best contender in any of its nominated categories, please do cast a vote for us: just click the big gold tag in the sidebar – it will take you straight to the voting page, where you can have a look at all the other finalists and submit your vote.