Some pretty sports fields, and some not so pretty

Here are some more memories. I was hesitant about the second part - I don't want to be cruel to anyone, or to diminish the hard work that's done at those venues. They are places that stick out in memories, though, and this exercise is all about remembering.

 

The good and bad of places to play

IN MY 30 years of covering school sport I’ve been to just about every school and sports club, in Joburg certainly, and also in most other parts of the country. Sports fields get, in our drought afflicted country, an inordinate share of the scarce water resources and they often stand out as emerald jewels in semi-desert surroundings. They are the favourite children of groundsmen and curators, and are lovingly cared for.

I’ve come across some spectacular venues on my travels and some that, for whatever reasons, are not quite as nice.

I decided, seeing as I’m in the business here of compiling lists, to include 10 great venues that I have been to, and 10 that are not as good. It’s a subjective exercise, based only on places I personally visited. We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and my evaluation is skin deep – it doesn’t consider any of the emotional attachments, the personal history of triumph and disaster, and the sweat deposited by those who trained and played on those fields.

So, expecting to catch flak, here are my 10 nicest school sports grounds, and 10 that are not so great.

The good

I’ve done this exercise before – I listed my 10 most beautiful schools rugby fields in a column, and the 10 nicest cricket fields I’d been to in another, and of course there were objections to them, as there will be to this combined list of the nicest places to watch school cricket or rugby.

1 Camps Bay High School

Coastal schools obviously have the advantage when it comes to beautiful backdrops to their sportsfields. The mountains and the sea make for spectacular settings and when you have both, it’s an unbeatable combination.

Camps Bay has that. We went on rugby tour there when I was at Highland North and I remember marvelling at it even then, when I was young and winning the game was the biggest thing in my life. Stand behind the posts on the Eastern side and you have Lions Head and the Twelve Apostles soaring above you; from the other end it looks like the ground behind the dead ball line drops off directly into the Atlantic Ocean.

We won the game that day, I think, but it’s that view that I will always remember.

2 Burger Field St John’s College.

It’s always about the backdrop when it comes to beautiful sports fields and, although there are no mountains, and no sea, the main rugby field at St John’s, carved out of the side of Houghton Ridge, has a glorious one.

It’s the back end of the Herbert Baker designed school building. Go around to the other side and you’ll see that the College was designed to look like one of the old public schools of England. From the rugby field side, it’s a soaring structure, built out of the same quartzite that the ridge is made of.

You won’t find a better man-made backdrop to a sports field anywhere in the country.

3 Bridge House Franschoek

No part of Franschoek, nestled in the Berg River valley below the Drakenstein and Franschoek mountains, is not beautiful. So, obviously any cricket ground located in the area is bound to be spectacular – and the field at Bridge House School is certainly that.

The school was only established in 1995, so I never knew about it until some games at the 2018 Khaya Majola Week were played there and I got to see it. The school is built on a corner of Graham Beck’s Bellingham wine estate and because it’s new, the trees planted around the field still have to grow into big providers of shade, but the outfield’s a carpet and the wicket, they told me, is excellent.

Architecturally, the school buildings next to the field have touch of Cape Dutch about them and behind them the mountains soar into the heavens. It’s quite a sight.

4 Pollock Oval Grey High School

There’s a bench next to the main cricket field at Grey High School in Port Elizabeth marking the fact that the field has been named the Pollock Oval, in honour of the school’s greatest sporting alumnus and South Africa’s greatest cricketer, Graeme Pollock. His achievements have been engraved on it, reminding current cricketers at the school just how great he was and, undoubtedly, inspiring them.`

And it’s quite a field. It is surrounded by massive old trees that cast a deep shade, overlooked by the main school building with its soaring clock tower. In one corner is the old pavilion, almost 100 years old, next to the new one – an artful blend of the old English cricket pavilion and Cape Dutch architectural styles.

Grey has produced the most SA Schools cricketers of any school in the land. Playing and practicing on a field like that must certainly have something to do with that.

5 De Villiers Oval SACS

Age has a lot to do with the beauty of sports fields. It’s difficult to make a newly constructed facility look great. SACS is the oldest school in the land and it has been on its current site, the Montabello Estate in Newlands below Devil’s Peak, since 1959.

That air of age and tradition, when combined with a spectacular setting, the mountain in the background and rain forest-like kloof vegetation just beyond the boundary – if it’s raining anywhere in Cape Town, it’s raining in Newlands, they say – makes the cricket field at SACS one of the most beautiful I have seen, even during the drought that the city was experiencing the last time I was there.

6 Brug Street Paarl

It’s the mountains, again, that make Paarl Boys’ High’s rugby field special. In this case the Du Toitskloof mountains loom beyond the touch line on one side of the field and Paarlberg on the other. When you sit in the stands, in front of you are the Berg river and the ‘onder-dorp’ beyond that, and behind you, the ‘bo-dorp’, the vineyards, Paarlberg, and the Taal Monument.

There’s a tangible sense of conflicted history about the town of Paarl which ties in somehow to one of the big curiosities of school rugby – Paarl is in the heart of the Boland, yet the rugby players at its schools play for Western Province at the Craven Week.

The Hoerjongenskool Paarl – Paarl Boys’ High or Booishaai - is part of SA school rugby’s elite. They are seldom outside the top three in the land. Their big derby against neighbours Paarl Gimnasium is played at the town’s Faure Street Stadium. Brug Street could never accommodate the crowds that turn up for that game. But it’s there that those boys learn to play the game – it left a deep impression on me.

7 The Mark Stevens Aquatic Centre, King Edward VII School

I’m getting ahead of myself with this one I know. The indoor pool at KES was only completed during the lockdown, and I haven’t seen a race swum, or a polo ball thrown in anger in it yet, but it’s the most exciting school sports development in Joburg in years.

I went to look at it a few times during the construction process and I went to take a look after it was finished and filled with water. It’s going to be something special.

The problem with Joburg’s temperate climate is that our summers are actually quite short. It’s too cold, really to train outdoors before late October, and by March the water’s getting cool again. So an indoor pool is important if you want to take water sports seriously. KES has one now and I predict they will soon return to their former glory as top dogs in the pool.

Facilities like that aren’t cheap and it’s incredible that there’s an old boy who was generous enough to foot the bill for its construction.

The annual King Edward Water Polo Tournament is the most prestigious in the country, when it’s next staged it will be in the best school pool in the land.

8 St Stithians Wayne Joubert Field

Sports fields in Joburg are not well known for spectacular views, the Wayne Joubert field in the uppermost part of the sprawling St Stithians Campus is an exception.

It’s not one of the school’s main fields – It’s a bit remote from the rest of the campus and it’s quite a steep walk to get there, but it does have floodlights, courtesy of Fifa, who used it as one of the training grounds for the 2010 World Cup. So it’s a venue for night matches – rugby and cricket, and the Saints soccer section is based up there.

The Higher Ground, a popular independently-run restaurant and watering hole, overlooks the field and there are few better places to watch sport than from its verandah, with a refreshment in your hand. You look down on the field and the school campus, across the Braamfontein spruit valley and up at the ultra modern urban landscape of the Sandton CBD.

That part of Joburg certainly isn’t flat and featureless and the Wayne Joubert field is a good place to observe it from.

9 TC Mitchell Oval St Alban’s College

St Alban’s College is located in a scenic part of Pretoria. It’s leafy and hilly, with lots of open space by way of nature reserves, parks and bird sanctuaries. The school is located between two of those - the Strubens Dam bird sanctuary and the Faerie Glen nature reserve.

The cricket field is on the nature reserve side and it is overlooked by a koppie and surrounded by trees with a spruit running along just beyond the boundary on the Eastern side. It’s an immaculately tended playing area. The pavilion has a breezy viewing deck, a great place to watch the action from on a typical hot Pretoria summers day.

The other fields at St Alban’s are similarly pleasant. The annual Independent Schools Festival is permanently staged at the school. You can see why.

10 Meadows, Michaelhouse

When I went to the Khaya Majola Week at Michaelhouse in 2018 it was the first time I had been to the school. It’s a magnificent place – red brick buildings dotted around a forested parkland and immaculate sportsfields all over the place.

The cricket week was head quartered in the Red and White – the clubhouse at the main cricket field and it’s a beautiful setting. The best of the fields, I thought, however was Meadows, the main rugby field, where there were also Khaya Majola Week matches played that week. 

Without it’s posts and markings, it was difficult to see exactly where the rugby fields lay in that extensive meadow. The edge of the vast lawn merged into the forest on the one end. On the day I was watching cricket there a Midlands misty drizzle descended, driving the players off the field. It was magical, one of the most beautiful of all the many beautiful places that my sports reporting travels have taken me to.

 

 

The not so good

1 Gelvandale Cricket Club

There are some other contenders, but the honour of the ugliest of all sports fields I’ve been at goes to the Gelvandale Cricket Club in Port Elizabeth. I was there at the 2008 Coke Week when the Gauteng under-19 side played against KwaZulu-Natal.

Gelvandale occupies an illustrious spot in cricket history in this country. Many cricketing greats from the apartheid days played there, and honour and glory goes to those who are keeping the game alive in the township. But I wondered why the boys from KES and St John’s, DHS and Kearsney have to spend one fifth of what was the highlight week of their cricketing lives so far, there.

To be kind, the ground slopes at about 10 degrees, north to south, and has doesn’t have much of what most people would call grass. It is flanked on one side by an electricity distribution station and the southern boundary is the fence of the local cemetery – one wag among the spectators wondered out loud which was worse, Eskom or the graveyard - they both had the stench of death about them.

Then there was the real stench, wafting in from a local sewage works and driving everyone into their cars with the windows up, in the heat and humidity.

2 Distell, Stellenbosch

There have been some other awful settings, often in places where you expect better. I remember the Khaya Majola Week in Stellenbosch where, instead of playing in a lovely setting among the vines and under the mountains, the players were expected to be inspired on a ground belonging to one of the liquor manufacturers, surrounded by railway carriages and empty packing crates, all underlain by that smell of stale booze that you get in a pub at opening time.

Most of the games that week were played at Stellenbosch University where the fields and setting were sublime, so Distell was only unattractive by comparison, I concede. And the wicket, I was told, was very good – Boland senior cricket was based there at one stage.

3. Witrand, Potchefstroom

At interprovincial weeks in Potchefstroom there are inevitably matches staged at Witrand, a local mental hospital. The situation there is similar to Distell – the field is in great condition and the wicket is so good that there have been first class games played there in the past. Aesthetically, however, it pales in comparison to the settings at the NW University’s Fanie du Toit Complex with its Senwes Stadium where the bulk of the games at the Khaya Majola Week I attended were played.

Knowing what the buildings surrounding the Witrand field are used for is a bit intimidating, and the odd inmate would press his face up against the fence from time to time, which is disconcerting, to say the least.

4 HTS Langlaagte

When I was teaching at Highland North Boys’ High School we played rugby in the, then, Administrator’s Cup league competition. You had no say over who you played against and we ended up going to places where we would never have ventured if we had a choice.

One of those was Langlaagte. The school was in the middle of an industrial area, the rugby field didn’t have much grass and it was located between the railway tracks and the mine dumps, which wasn’t great when the wind came up in the second half of the game we played there. Then there were the opposition players, most of them were from a neighbouring orphanage. In my mind’s eye all 15 were identical – around 5’11’’ tall, scrawny, crew-cut, covered in scabs and hard as nails. My memory might be exaggerating the situation, but it was certainly intimidating.

The 1^st team game ended in a 0-0 draw, which sums it all up perfectly.

5 Willowmoore Park

The HQ of Easterns cricket falls into both the good and the bad categories. The stadium used to have those industrial revolution era concrete light pylons, which have since been removed. The main stadium is a bit barren and it’s Northern end abuts on the sleazier side of Benoni’s CBD.

The B field is similarly bleak, but go down to the C and D fields and you are transported into a charming rural setting: fields ringed by blue gums, and bordered by a vlei lined with the willow trees that the complex gets its name from.

It’s as pleasant a setting to watch cricket in as any I’ve been to.

6 Benny’s Care Sports Academy

I speak about the remarkable achievements of this little school in deep rural Limpopo elsewhere and their achievements are all the more noteworthy when you see the field they practice and play on.

I went there with the sponsors one year before their under-12s left for the Danone Nations Cup world finals and I was taken aback to see that they didn’t actually have a field. There was an area of cleared veld with markings on it which over-use had rendered completely grassless.

We watched the coach take his team though a practice session on it which included some elaborate drills that he had learnt when he was sent on a Fifa Coaching course. All part of the Benny’s magic.

7 The Alex Cricket Stadium

At a time when Cricket South Africa was still putting money into their development programme, they built a field in Alexandra Township, Northwest of Johannesburg. I went there on a press junket soon after it was completed and it was pretty impressive, well grassed, with a freshly laid wicket and newly built changerooms.

The problem of course is the location of the field. It’s on Alex’s notorious West Bank, so, it’s prone to flooding and surrounded by the dwellings of some of the poorest of the poor. It’s not an easy place to get to and, once there, the environment simply doesn’t allow for the quiet, relaxed atmosphere that is so much part of the summer game.

There were matches played there during the 2017 Khaya Majola Week and the facility was starting to show signs of wear. By 2020, I believe, it had fallen into disrepair and is being neglected. 

8 UJ Rugby Stadium

The UJ stadium in Melville has improved with age. It was a soulless concrete bowl when it was first built, designed - I’m guessing - by the same architects who constructed the then RAU campus across the road to resemble a giant laager. Now that the trees that were planted then have grown and the bright grey concrete has weathered a bit, the edges have been softened and the place is a lot more pleasant.

It’s still a horribly designed stadium, though. There’s a Tartan athletics track around the field, which puts it pretty far away from the spectators, and the massive grandstand rises 100m above the level of the field. If you are sitting in the good seats outside the clubhouse at the top of the stand you definitely need binoculars to see what’s going on down on the grass.

My abiding memory of the place is, however, being very cold there. In the years that I was a Transvaal schools selector we always held Craven Week trials there, the field is down below ground level, surrounded by water and when the sun goes down on a winter evening, it’s freezing!

9 Meulsloot, Paul Roos Gimnasium

I’ve included Meulsloot, a mud patch at Paul Roos Gim where the Golden Lions beat the Griffons 47-29 on the final day of the 2015 Craven Week, but it was the circumstances, rather than the field itself that made it a horrible place to play that day.

The Craven Week is all about the final day’s fixtures. The top two sides play the last game on the A field, the teams ranked third and fourth the second last game, the fifth and sixth ranked the one before that, and so on. Once the A field schedule is full, the matches are shifted onto the B and C fields at the venue.

The 2015 weeks saw lots of rain, so only two games were played on the main field on the last day, to preserve it for the televised main game. The Lions might have got an early A field fixture if it were not for that, but the record shows that they lost their first two games in 2015 and were relegated to the B field on the final day. No matter where the week might be, when that happens the ground you are dispatched to will be remembered as an awful one.

10 Pretoria Boy’s High Hockey Field

The Pretoria Boys’ High School campus is the most spectacular I’ve ever been to. The buildings and grounds are sprawled across a hillside, surrounded by forests, with ponds and wetlands dotted around it.

To call anything about it ugly would be ridiculous, but I’m including the hockey astroturf, with the athletics track around it, as one of the less than superb fields I’ve been to, simply because it’s weird watching sport there.

Whenever there’s a track around a field the spectators are removed from the action and that applies here. The astro has also been placed in the middle of what was an existing field, so the stands and embankments are some distance away. I found it difficult to feel any excitement watching hockey from there, and in my newspaper days, impossible to take action photographs.

It’s even stranger in athletics season. There are structures on the sidelines of the hockey field and when the middle and long distance races are on, the runners disappear behind them and appear again a while later, much like the horses in the Durban July who are out of sight for a period when they go behind the drill hall in the center of the Greyville race course.

The remoteness of their spectators doesn’t seem to bother the Boys’ High hockey players much, though, their first team is consistently among the best in the land.