Hemmed in by gritty but bland urbanism, Kingsmead throbs with history as juicy as the skies above.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
KINGSMEAD isn’t about a mountain, a boorish crowd, or sweeping grass banks hazily hung with braai smoke. That’s what Newlands, the Wanderers and Centurion are about. Kingsmead is about nothing more nor less than cricket.
So it seems cruel that, because of the weather, cricket isn’t often about Kingsmead. Sunday’s first men’s T20I between South Africa and India in Durban was the latest case in point. Scheduled to start at 4pm (local time), it was abandoned almost two hours later due to steady rain.
No ground in South Africa has endured as much interference from the elements in internationals as Kingsmead. Until Sunday, the only washed out men’s T20Is among the 131 played in this country were India’s match against Scotland in the 2007 World T20 and a game between South Africa and Pakistan in March 2013. Both were to have been staged at Kingsmead. In those instances, and as was the case on Sunday, which was to have been the grand occasion of the ground’s 20th men’s T20I, we didn’t get as far as the toss.
Seven of Kingsmead’s 48 men’s ODIs have suffered a similar fate, although only one of them without a ball bowled. That’s more than any of South Africa’s other 11 ODI venues. Centurion is in second place with four. Of all the 385 men’s ODIs in South Africa, 20 have recorded no results or abandonments. That’s a 5.19% history of washouts. At Kingsmead it’s 14.58%, or almost three times as much as nationwide. Curiously, all of the eight women’s white-ball internationals played there have reached a positive result.
Sunday’s failure to launch was sadder than others because it was to have been the last time an international was played on a pitch prepared by Wilson Ngobese, who is retiring after joining the groundstaff in 1975 and being appointed head curator in 1999.
And because it followed Saturday’s launch there of a book by Ashwin Desai entitled “Of Fathers, Sons and Timeless Tests: Wicket Tales from Kingsmead”, which commemorates 100 years of international cricket at the ground. Desai, a firebrand sociologist, has in the past written movingly of the racial prejudice meted out to his father at Kingsmead during apartheid, but also of watching Barry Richards’ artistry at the crease there for South Africa’s then strictly whites-only Test team.
“Kingsmead displays an architecture out of place, with brutalist banks and gleaming office parks all around the stadium,” Desai writes in his book. “It sits at a slightly odd angle and could be seen as slightly old school, but doesn’t care. It is like a grandfather sitting on Durban’s stoep [verandah], clipping his toenails and refusing to hand over the inheritance his progeny is so desperate to spend.”
Hemmed in by gritty but bland urbanism, shoved between a hindu temple that has stood from 1898 and functions still, and a hotel that opened in 1997 but, because of the pandemic, hasn’t checked-in a single guest since January 2021, Kingsmead throbs with history as juicy as the skies above.
It was there, as the title of Desai’s book hints, that South Africa and England played themselves to a standstill in the timeless Test of march 1939, when even 10 days of cricket couldn’t produce a winner. The English had to make their apologies and withdraw in order to rush to Cape Town in time to catch their ship home. Even this famous match was also affected by rain, which fell on the uncovered pitch on two nights during the match and thus prevented the surface from deteriorating significantly.
On another wet evening at Kingsmead, Mark Boucher blocked what became the last ball of South Africa’s 2003 World Cup match against Sri Lanka, thus eliminating the home side from the next round. The South Africans mistakenly thought the Duckworth/Lewis target they reached to tie the game was what they had needed to score to win. And so — with the rain tumbling down and the end of proceedings imminent — Boucher did not attempt a single.
Kingsmead was also where India and Pakistan delivered a contest for the ages during the 2007 World T20. Rain again intervened, interrupting India’s innings three times. But it stayed away long enough for all 40 overs to be bowled, which ended with Misbah—ul-Haq being run out to force a tie. India won the resultant bowl out.
There was no such drama on Sunday, just another damp and dreary few hours watching water gather on the covers and soak the outfield despite the best efforts of Ngobese and his staff. You had to wonder, as the rain fell, whether Kingsmead wasn’t about cricket after all.
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