‘Ten years I’ve been here. I get goosebumps thinking about it,” says Siya Kolisi, sitting on a wooden bench in the changing rooms below Newlands Stadium.
“It’s become my home,” says the loose forward who led the Springboks to victory at the Rugby World Cup last year and who also captains the Stormers, Cape Town’s Super Rugby franchise.
“I love playing here. You feel the atmosphere. You are so close to people they can almost touch you — that is very special.”
Kolisi joins a long line of rugby legends to call Newlands home. It’s the second-oldest Test venue in the world after Lansdowne Road in Dublin, which dates from 1872. The Irish stadium was demolished in 2006 and replaced with the Aviva Stadium on the same site.
But this year marks a final chapter in Newlands’ history — the Stormers and Western Province Rugby are moving to Cape Town Stadium next year, and the last-ever Newlands Test will be on July 4, when the Boks meet Scotland.
Loyalty to Newlands runs deep and it will be a wrenching transition for fans and players, even those who support the move.
“People are crazy about this stadium,” says Brian Petersen, who has worked there for 22 years.
“When we were changing the grass, people would come to me and say: ‘Please can I have this piece of grass, or that piece of grass where so-and-so player scored that try?’ ”
WHERE A WOMAN TACKLED LOMU
Mervin Gaobone, whose duties include keeping the players’ changing rooms shipshape, has worked at the stadium for 32 years.
“This is where Jonah Lomu met his first [wife],” he says. The legendary All Black wing, who played in the World Cup in SA in 1995, married South African Tanya Rutter in 1996, but they divorced four years later.
Springbok wing Cheslin Kolbe, one of the stars of last year’s World Cup in Japan, proposed to his girlfriend on the side of the Newlands pitch last year because they first met at the stadium.
The romance of Newlands goes back to the final decade of the 19th century when Lydia Letterstedt, a member of one of the Cape’s original beer brewing families, leased and later sold the land it stands on to the Western Province Rugby Football Union.
The lease agreement stipulated that the rugby union buy beer only from the Letterstedt Brewery.
Rugby historian Paul Dobson, who wrote Newlands 100: One Hundred Years of Rugby at Newlands 1890-1990 to commemorate the stadium’s centennial, says the rugby union first asked its cricket counterparts if it could use their pitch at Newlands in the off-season, but was turned down.
Club rugby was the heart and soul of Newlands during its early days and the first official match was a club game played at Newlands on May 31 1890 between Villagers and Stellenbosch.
Dobson, who has both played at Newlands and refereed hundreds of matches there — and whose son John is the Stormers’ coach — says he first went to a Test match at the stadium as a nine-year-old on July 16 1949.
This was SA’s first international game after World War 2 and the Springboks were playing arch-rivals New Zealand. Dobson had to sleep overnight in a queue outside the stadium, but was rewarded when the Boks won 15-11.
“Policemen were throwing their helmets in the air and I threw my suitcase into the air and ran onto the field,” he says.
“Policemen were throwing their helmets in the air and I threw my suitcase into the air and ran onto the field.”
— Rugby historian Paul Dobson
South African rugby’s entry to the world stage dates back to 1891, when mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes provided backing for Western Province to bring out a touring team from the UK. The Anglo-Scottish team brought with them a gleaming cup donated by a shipping tycoon called Donald Currie — the eponymous trophy for which local provinces now play an annual tournament.
Western Province will be playing their hearts out this season to hold it aloft one more time at Newlands.
In 1896 the Springboks gathered at Newlands to play their first Test match, against the British Isles, winning 5-0.
But the fervour around club rugby is what gave Newlands its character. Players would stream to Newlands every week, says Dobson.
“[In those days] the men would work 5½ days a week, then, at 1pm on Saturday, they would catch a train to Newlands. Most people did not have cars and there were few bioscopes.”
CLUB RUGBY'S HEYDAY
For decades club attendance at Newlands was strong, peaking at nearly 10,000 for a match in 1953, and clubs raised money to develop the stadium by staging fêtes and dances.
Permanent concrete stands went up in 1920 and a grandstand was built in 1927, increasing capacity to 23,000.
Today, Newlands can take about 45,000 spectators, compared with 60,000 at Cape Town Stadium — which was built for the 2010 Fifa World Cup — and 70,000 at Ellis Park in Johannesburg.
Perhaps it’s the proximity of the brewery, but rugby fans quickly earned a reputation for boisterous behaviour. Signs forbidding “barracking” went up in 1924, and more recently “musical instruments” — notably the vuvuzela — were banned.
Radio history was made at the stadium in 1927 when Archie Shacksnovis, a former provincial player, broadcast the first match commentary in SA.
In the years between the two world wars the stadium’s facilities were steadily enhanced. In 1931 “the Malay stand” — where spectators of colour were forced to congregate in the years of segregation — was enlarged.
Rugby was popular across all of the city’s racial communities, but apartheid meant that Newlands was long off-limits to players who were not classified as white.
“I never played at Newlands myself. I never had the opportunity,” says Dougie Dyers, who captained the segregated Proteas rugby team in the 1970s and played alongside legends such as Errol Tobias.
“I would watch rugby there with my father and he would say: ‘One day we will play here.’ My three sons have played here.”
Newlands hosted its first mixed-race rugby match in 1975 and, in 1977, three of the racially segregated rugby unions joined forces under the South African Rugby Board (SARB). The anti-apartheid South African Rugby Union fought for nonracial sport and its members did not play at Newlands.
Danie Craven, who served as president of the SARB from 1956 until his death in 1993, worked to break down barriers, believing ‘‘we can save SA on the rugby field”, says Dobson.
In October 1988, Craven and rugby stalwart Louis Luyt met the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki and others in Zimbabwe to discuss forming a nonracial rugby union, which was achieved in 1992.
This meeting triggered the wrath of then-education minister FW de Klerk, who phoned Craven to admonish him. “I am shocked that the president of one of SA’s national sports bodies bypassed its government and turned to a terrorist organisation,” said De Klerk at the time.
Craven has a stand named after him at Newlands, which may be demolished along with the rest of the stadium next year — or the stadium may be turned into a residential and retail space following a reported R110m lease deal with Investec.
FANS IN MOURNING
Dobson says: “It is almost like we are selling our birthright. Newlands is rugby, finished and klaar.”
Opponents of the move fume over, among other things, the role apparently played by disgraced Fifa president Sepp Blatter in the decision to reject Newlands as a venue for the 2010 Soccer World Cup and push for construction of a new stadium in Green Point instead. He told organisers Cape Town would not host a semifinal unless the stadium was built. Cape Town Stadium was built at a cost of R4.4bn, despite sceptics warning that it would be a white elephant. The City of Cape Town hopes that hosting provincial rugby matches will prove profitable.
Plumstead resident Ellen Fedele started a petition to “Save Newlands Stadium” but only about 250 people signed it.
It’s the physical proximity between fans and players at Newlands that will be most keenly missed.
Kolisi says: “When the siren used to go, it was intimidating and we would walk out slowly onto the pitch … [for] inspiration, you would listen to the cheering and see the Mexican wave.”
Petersen says the atmosphere is not the same at other stadiums. “I worked at Cape Town Stadium twice for the Sevens [international rugby tournament]. There’s a gap there between the spectators and the players this big,” he says, stretching his arms wide. He brings his hands together so they are nearly touching to demonstrate what it’s like at Newlands.
But Gaobone finds a small silver lining, for the players at least: the changing rooms are bigger at Cape Town Stadium, he says.
Kolisi says: “For our last match, we want to get out at the circle and walk to the changing rooms, so close to people they can touch us. We want kids to come and have special memories of that day.”
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