July 15 – Cricket South Africa said it expects to lure the largest crowd to a cricket match in the country by hosting a 20-20 match between India and South Africa at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, which was built specially for the World Cup.
The match, which will take place on January 9 at the Stadium where Spain beat Germany 1-0 in the World Cup semi-final, and organsiers are hoping for a crowd of 70,000.
South Africa’s biggest cricket ground is the Wanderers in Johannesburg, which holds 34,000.
South African stadiums built to host the World Cup are already targeting other sporting codes and events to recover the costs of building and maintaining them.
The Springboks rugby team are due play New Zealand at the 90,000-seat Soccer City in Johannesburg on August 21.
“The Durban game will attract the biggest crowd ever to a cricket match in South Africa,” said Mark Owen-Smith, a spokesman for Cricket South Africa.
The Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia is the world’s largest cricket stadium, with a total capacity of 100,000
.
“India has massive support in Durban,” said Owen-Smith.
The match will be played in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Indians in South Africa.
Between 1860 and 1911 more than 152,000 Indian laborers arrived in the KwaZulu-Natal province, of which Durban is its largest city, to work on sugar-cane plantations.
The province has the highest proportion of South Africans of Indian descendant living in the country, where Indians and Asians account for 2.5 percent of the population of 47.9 million.