A banner at the Port Elizabeth airport says ‘Welcome to the Friendly City’, but it would have been a lot more appropriate if it was labelled the Sleepy Hollow. Eerie silence fills the streets of this tiny harbour town only to be pierced by the fading gongs of an old church bell from the city’s centre.
Here everyone knows each other and every destination is a five-minute walk away. An old lighthouse still stands proud on a hilltop overlooking a cemetery, a bunch of anglicised houses — some of them with cenotaphs — and then the Summerstarnd waterfront. All this makes it appear like a scene from a 1950s English movie.
If you didn’t know better, you would’ve felt that the crew had stayed back long after movie was finished.
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Situated bang in the middle of the quaint atmosphere, St George’s Park blends well with the surroundings but since this is the only park, it can be a source of evening walkers eager to enjoy the summer season by walking outside the periphery of the stadium. On Thursday, a ‘huge throng’ gathered outside for the game.
The throng being a group of 20 people and the game being a rugby face-off between two local teams at the practice facility of St George’s Park!
Since it’s one of the oldest cricket grounds in the country — it was the venue of South Africa’s first Test — its corridors are lined with cricketing gems of the years gone by.
One such is about an incident in domestic cricket where the bail didn’t fall despite the ball hitting the wicket. The story, as written of, on the wall here, goes like this: “The fielder picked up the ball — his aim was accurate and the ball clipped the wickets. The batsmen were two metres from the crease when the ball struck the wicket. The umpire saw the bails lift into the air and signalled the batsmen “out”. But then the batsman looked back and saw that the bails had not hit the ground — they were stuck between the wickets. He appealed to the umpire. The umpire gave one helluva smile and said, ‘S**t, you’re right’ and called the batsman back.”