Farewell to Newlands, mecca of memories
Many of the things that have passed into rugby history are welcome to stay there: no one blessed with a beating heart and a functioning conscience misses the rebel tours of apartheid South Africa or England’s nocturnal depravities in Queenstown or Pablo Matera’s social media adventures circa 2012.
At the same time, it is perfectly reasonable, not to say necessary, to mourn the demise and disappearance of things worthy of our undying regard. On the weekend of the first Lions Test against the Springboks, two of the lost treasures that spring immediately to mind are Newlands, the nerve-tinglingly evocative old stadium in the shadow of Table Mountain, and proper touring just about anywhere on the planet.
We cry for Newlands. The pandemic has forced the Lions to play all three of their 2021 Tests in Cape Town, yet the most venerable of the southern hemisphere’s rugby cathedrals, visited on no fewer than five occasions by the moustachioed Scottish stockbroker Bill Maclagen and his pioneering spirits in 1891, is being deconsecrated. Rugby’s ancient hallelujahs must now be sung elsewhere.
There is no doubting the virtue of the sport’s new home in the city, the 12year-old Cape Town Stadium at Green Point. It has easier access and escape routes and as an all-seater structure, it gives the vertically challenged a decent view of the action. Where Newlands had more than a whiff of the museum about it, CTS smells bang up to date.
But that’s the point for us oldstagers lost in a fog of fustiness. Green Point is modern in the way virtually all new venues are modern, while Newlands made it up as it went along, rather like the sport it staged. Bits were added and bits were taken away; some sections were upgraded, others were left pretty much as they were in honour of ages past.
There is no sense of honour about the place now that it’s about to become a retail hub. Honour and shopping don’t really mix.
It is not always the case that the new betrays the old. If the current Murrayfield cannot begin to match the old one, the French lost something when they shipped out of Parc des Princes and the Italians forfeited even more by abandoning Stadio Flaminio, who will argue that the rugby experience in Cardiff and Dublin has not been improved by redevelopment?
The deeper concern must be the continuing compression of Lions tour itineraries – the shrinking of their world by bottom-line executives driven purely by commercial imperatives.
The curse of Covid has distorted pretty much everything on this current trip, but when the original programme was announced back in 2019, the breadth of old had already been replaced by the narrowness of the new: two Tests in Johannesburg,
“Union lovers need to feel in the thick of it...to smell and feel the contest as well as see it”
one in Cape Town.
Not so long ago, a Lions Test series in South Africa without a match at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria OR one at Kings Park in Durban would have seemed preposterous. Those venues were, and remain, among the very best of the best when it comes to the Union game. They should be ever-presents, not now-and-agains.
Will the human abacuses in business suits continue to marginalise them, as they have marginalised Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein? Just consider: if the New Zealanders can run a Lions Test series exclusively in the North Island and reduce Christchurch and Dunedin to second-class status, as they did in 2017, anything is possible.
While it is important to point out that Christchurch is a special case – there is reason to hope that after losing Lancaster Park to the 2011 earthquake, the country’s second biggest city will reclaim its sporting prestige in the coming years – Dunedin already feels like an afterthought when it comes to the Lions, who have not played a Test down there in Otago in almost four decades.
Which is scandalous, when you think about it. The Otago of old beat the Lions on four occasions, more than any other provincial side anywhere in the world, and the Highlanders’ victory in 2017 made it five. Moreover, rickety Carisbrook, the “House of Pain”, was easily the most forbidding of the All Black fortresses. They lost there about as often as Buck Shelford lost a fight.
Carisbrook is no more: it was decommissioned after the 2011 World
Cup and replaced by a rather lovely indoor stadium with fresh grass and a roof made of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, which is easier to produce than it is to pronounce. But Dunedin is small in population terms – about the size of Bedford, give or take – and these days, small is a long way short of beautiful.
The game is losing something of the best of itself. A friend said just recently that “while you watch football sitting back, you watch rugby sitting forward”. By which he meant that Union lovers need to feel in the thick of it – to smell and feel the contest as well as see it.
You could do that at Newlands and Carisbrook, with their close-quarter intimacy: you can still do it at Loftus Versfeld and Kings Park. Yes, there is more money to be made at the biggest venues in the biggest cities, but at what cost?