Lucky to be in Centurion

Yesterday was the day for a personal record. For the first time, I watched two cricket matches at separate cricket grounds on the same day, and I was not meant to be at either. Truth be told, I caught only a few overs of the Sri Lanka-New Zealand game at The Wanderers before leaving for the Edwardian Sports Complex, where India and Australia were practising, then watched Owais Shah club those sixes on TV. At six pm, dinner plans would have been the logical choice, but I knew I'd rather be elsewhere.

I was contemplating dialing a cab when I had a stroke of luck. A young South African journalist who had been assigned the Wanderers game was driving down to Centurion to watch the South African chase. I gratefully hitched a ride.

Centurion is around 40 kilometres from Johannesburg, and the drive takes 30-40 minutes. The highway is dotted with office buildings that belong to leading South African companies that have been moving away from Johannesburg's expensive, and increasingly decrepit, central business district. Locals say that it is easier to get to Centurion from many parts of Johannesburg than it is to the Wanderers, which is at one end of the city.

And SuperSport Park is the prettier ground. It is largely open, and the grassbanks constitute about three-fourth of the sitting area. And the staff are friendlier too. For some reason, my accreditation card - these are swipe cards that are scanned in a card reader to gain entry - didn't work yesterday and even a senior ICC official struggled to let me in at The Wanderers. But at the SuperSport Park, the staff understood and waved me in with a cheerful shrug.

Inside the ground, too, the differences are similar. The Wanderers feels imposing, ceremonial and stifling; and the SuperSport Park informal and welcoming. And as press boxes go, it will be tough to find a better one: it is perfectly positioned, at the right height just behind the sight screen and it's open.

And I would have been sorry had I not gone. He couldn't quite haul his team over the line, but Graeme Smith played one of the great one-day innings of his time. He is a cricketer I have grown to like. And the atmosphere was electric. And it gave me a story to write. Dinner would have been such a waste.