No More Stormers

I’ve always felt lucky that, by pure accident of birth, I’ve had decent sport’s teams to support. Western Province and Stormers rugby. Cape Cobras cricket.

Even Cape Town Ajax is quite good – not that I really follow football, but anyway.

It’s always seemed bizarre to me when people from South Africa stoically support a team like Chelsea or Manchester United; and even more bizarre when someone from the UK supports a team from another city or county.

I could never support the Sharks, because I wasn’t born in Durban. And now residing in Plymouth I feel if I’m to follow any team it’d have to be a one from my newly adopted city.

Doing a bit of research on the Plymouth Albion rugby website in a stopover at Abu Dhabi, I read that their weekend home game was played to “a crowd of almost 3000 people” – smaller in scale than, say, Newlands rugby ground that often hosts around fifty thousand fans.

And it appears they’re not so hot when it comes to the game either, being third from the bottom of the Championship log the last time I checked. Although this was possibly because two of their players had been away playing for the Canadian squad sent to the World Cup.

If I were so inclined I could imagine myself as the newest member of this team. And I might be convinced to firmly believe that it’s not just tries and penalties that win rugby games, but screaming and shouting and flag waving too.

If not, I could at least believe that the more bums on stadium seats means more money to buy (or rent, really) better players, thereby improving performance.

It was a bit of a culture shock when I posited to Lucy that maybe we could pop down to our local and watch the next Albion game on the tellybox. She smiled warmly at my naïveté and said, “They don’t televise Albion matches.”

In South Africa they put even schoolboy games on Supersport.

So it seems I’ll have to burst my comfort bubble and venture into the wild. Go there, do that, get the t-shirt.

But with a Plymouth Albion jersey at a whopping fifty quid I’ll just have to make do with reports in the Herald.