LUKE ALFRED | SuperSport Park enters middle age

Share current article via EmailShare current article via FacebookShare current article via TwitterShare current article via LinkedInLuke AlfredEnter fullscreen mode displaying this image.ExpandSouth Africa fans during a T20 match between South Africa and the West Indies at Supersport Park. Picture: Samuel Shivambu/BackpagePix SuperSport Park turns 40 this month. There will be gala dinners and unveilings and beery private retrospectives, some to coincide with the Test match against Bangladesh in two weeks’ time.

The ground hosted its first domestic match in 1986, featuring a team of mainly fringe Transvaal players — Lee Barnard, Noel Day, Roy Pienaar, and Mike Rindel — who were good but not good enough to elbow Clive Rice and Alan Kourie out of the team. Pienaar was once spoken about in the same breath as Graeme Pollock. That it never turned out that way doesn’t mean he didn’t have a cover drive you’d happily pay a few extra bucks for.

Skipper Barnard encouraged what were then Northern Transvaal players to speak English, which they did — but only up to a point. Eventually the cultural tide turned. SuperSport Park is in the suburb of Centurion, once called Verwoerdburg. This is an Afrikaans heartland. Soon Northern Transvaal and, later, the Titans became a side in which South Africa’s great Afrikaans-speaking cricketers flourished.

AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis and Morné Morkel were all born within months of each other in 1984, two years before the ground’s inaugural match. As boys, De Villiers and Du Plessis watched Northern Transvaal and the Titans play, sliding down the grass embankment next to the scoreboard on flattened cardboard boxes. Morkel lived further away, in Vereeniging, but he, too, became a Titan, like his older brother, Albie, now an assistant coach to Titans head coach Rivash Gobind.

As it grew more established, the ground became a magnet for ambition. If you wanted to play for South Africa and remain in the province, you played there first. As the great American novelist Don DeLillo writes in Underworld, “Longing on a grand scale is what makes history.”

Every cricket ground has its secret garden, its squares of charm. SuperSport Park has its grass embankment, a place where the shade from the plane trees is soft and the presence of the beer stalls nearby adds to the mellowness. It seems churlish to ask how much cricket is seen by those who sit on the grass, but let’s assume the punters see a sequence or two. The authorities know the embankment is sought-after. Tickets there cost more than they do for the grandstand.

One of SuperSport Park’s original features is a wall of pencil drawings depicting all the players who have represented the province on the way to the Long Room. The tradition was started by former CEO Elize Lombard, and the drawings show the players’ faces in life-size. It’s thrilling to be reminded that, for example, Jacques Rudolph was once so young.

Looking at the drawings, you forget that Neil McKenzie used to play for the Titans because he couldn’t get on with then Transvaal coach Ray Jennings. Who could forget the swashbuckling Rindel? He was once called “guava” because he turned pink in the sun. Burly all-rounder Anton “Yogi” Ferreira was nicknamed after Yogi Bear.

De Villiers used the store of inspiration gained from sitting on the SuperSport grass well. He scored four of his 22 Test centuries at SuperSport Park, one more than the three he scored at the Wanderers and the three at Newlands. Du Plessis, who long lingered in De Villiers’ shadow, scored two of his eight Test centuries there. For the Proteas, it’s become a fortress — they’ve won 24 of the 31 Tests played there, losing four, drawing three.

The pitch hasn’t only been kind to batters. Kagiso Rabada’s match analysis of 13/144 in the fourth Test against England in 2016 remains his best-ever. Lungi Ngidi took 6/39 against India there in 2018 — his best analysis in Tests too.

The ground also has a wetter, darker side. Sometimes the two combine. In January 2000, Hansie Cronjé famously persuaded England captain Nasser Hussain to forfeit an innings in a rain-interrupted Test, promising to do likewise, giving England the opportunity to win the match after South Africa had already batted.

We didn’t know it then, but Cronjé received money and a leather jacket from bookie Marlon Aronstam for doing so. We thought Cronjé was a visionary. He wasn’t — he just loved money.

Would you like to comment on this article?Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.

Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.