Cape Town puts the ‘Green’ back into its Green Point Stadium!
Ever since I broke the news on this blog that the grass was struggling to grow at Cape Town’s dodgy new World Cup stadium, city officials have been toiling day and night to, in their local parlance, “maak ‘n plan”.
There was every danger that Green Point Stadium was to be renamed Brown Point Stadium due to the brown patches that were breaking out all over the playing surface.
But a very relieved Capetonian has now sent me a latest picture which shows that the Cape Town organising committee, in a total panic after my startling revelations, clearly got somebody to stitch together 863,294 snooker table baize cloths to place over their fast-deceasing kikuyu grass. Either that or Queen Helen of the Republic of Cape Town decreed that many truckloads of cheap labour be trucked in from the Cape Flats to paint the pitch a deep green shade with Plascon “Pitch and All” Verdant Green No. 2.
So I’m chuffed to say that, despite my worst fears, Cape Town will not let the side down after all come June, 2010. And here is the proof…
It remains one of the world's most boring stadium designs but at least the Capies have managed to put the Green into Green Point!
Unlike Durban’s Moses Mabhida Stadium, an architectural feat of total stunningness, the designers who were let loose on this thing (above) are clearly of the “functionality” genre. Mind you, given the atrocious weather which will descend on the poor World Cup fans who have to support their teams in Cape Town, one imagines that top priority on the brief was to try to keep them dry.
Hence the little hole in the roof and Green Point’s remarkable similarity to a “half-chewed Polo Mint”. I think that footie fans would probably feel less claustrophobic in one of those dingy clubs in Cape Town’s Long St on a Saturday night than in this virtually enclosed shopping mall look-a-like.
Still, the good people of the Republic of Cape Town are trying hard not to embarrass us and for this they should be supported, lauded and, if necessary, even counselled. They might have dropped their aloofness for a couple of hours around the recent World Cup draw but are still clearly out of their depth when trying to keep their end up as a World Cup venue. Poor little babies.
* A Moses Mabhida arch-like doff of the old red hat to Simon Fishley for sending this pic over to me.