SuperSport Park, Centurion: Ground Guide

SuperSport Park is not in Johannesburg and it is not in Pretoria. It sits in Centurion, the sprawl between the two, at roughly 1,450 metres above sea level, and that last number explains more about the cricket played there than anything else on the ground's information board.

It is also, unusually for a Test venue, a ground with grass banks rather than concrete on much of its perimeter. People bring cooler boxes and sit on the slope. The main grandstand is substantial and the seated capacity runs to around twenty-two thousand, but the character of the place comes from the embankments, which fill on a Boxing Day morning and empty in about four minutes when the afternoon storm arrives.

Northerns have played their cricket here since the mid-1980s. The ground took the SuperSport name after the broadcaster invested in it, and it has been South Africa's second Highveld Test venue for thirty years without ever quite escaping comparison with the Wanderers in Johannesburg forty-five minutes down the road.

What 1,450 metres does to a cricket ball

Altitude is the ground's defining variable and it works in three directions at once.

The air is thinner, so the ball carries further. A mishit that would be caught at mid-off at sea level clears the infield here, and totals in limited-overs cricket run higher than the surface alone would suggest. Bowlers who rely on drift and dip lose some of both.

The same thinness affects conventional swing, which is generally reduced, while seam movement off the pitch is not — and Centurion's surface tends to have enough grass and enough pace to reward a bowler hitting the seam hard on a good length. The result is a venue where the new ball in the first hour is genuinely dangerous, particularly under morning cloud, and where the ball stops doing much once the shine has gone and the sun is high.

Then there is the weather. Highveld summer afternoons produce thunderstorms with very little notice, and a Centurion Test can lose a session to a storm that arrives, empties itself and clears inside ninety minutes. Overhead conditions swing rapidly, which is why the toss at Centurion is treated with more caution than at most South African grounds.

The practical upshot for a touring batter: survive the first eighteen overs and the ground becomes one of the better places in the country to bat. Fail to, and it becomes one of the fastest ways to lose a Test.

The first Test, and the ledger since

Test cricket arrived on 16 November 1995, against England. Shaun Pollock made his Test debut in that match, which gives the ground a reasonable claim to having launched the best South African bowling career of the readmission era; Pollock's record is one of the most economical in the game's history.

South Africa's record at Centurion has been strong for most of the period since, and the reason is a combination of the altitude, the seam-friendly first hour and the fact that visiting batters usually arrive here early in a tour with limited acclimatisation. The exceptions, when they come, tend to be emphatic rather than narrow.

The ground's reputation is for producing results rather than draws, and the record supports it. Centurion Tests that go the distance are the minority; more commonly one side is bowled out cheaply in the first two days and the match is effectively settled by the third afternoon. That suits broadcasters and ticket-holders on days one to three and not those holding day-five tickets, which is a trade-off the venue has never resolved.

The one direction the surface can move in is towards flatness. When Centurion is dry, the grass is thin and the storms stay away, it produces very large scores: the highest Test total made at the ground is 621, by South Africa against Sri Lanka in the 2020-21 season, and there have been several other four-hundred-plus first innings. That variance — from a bowler's paradise to a run feast, depending largely on preparation and cloud — is the honest description of the pitch, and it is why pre-match assessments of Centurion are so often wrong.

18 January 2000

The most notorious day in the ground's history has almost nothing to do with cricket conditions.

The fifth Test of England's 1999-2000 tour lost most of its middle to rain. South Africa had made 155 for six in 45 overs on a curtailed first day; three days then went. On the final morning, with a draw the only available result, Hansie Cronje put a proposal to England through Alec Stewart: South Africa would resume and declare, England would forfeit their first innings, South Africa would forfeit their second, and England would be set a target on the last day. Nasser Hussain accepted.

Cronje declared at 248 for eight. Both sides then forfeited an innings — the first time that had happened in a Test match. England were left 249 to win in 79 overs and got there, by two wickets, in what was received at the time as an act of enterprising captaincy by both men.

It was not. Cronje later admitted he had been approached by a bookmaker and offered money to ensure the match produced a result. The day that had been reported as Test cricket at its most imaginative turned out to be the earliest publicly visible symptom of the match-fixing scandal that ended his career. Anyone reading the scorecard now sees two declarations at nought for nought and a two-wicket finish, and none of the context.

The ground itself carries none of the blame and a good deal of the association. Centurion is where the laws had to accommodate something nobody had written a procedure for, and it remains the only Test in which both sides forfeited an innings. That the forfeiture was legal, ingenious, popular and corrupt all at once is the reason the match is still discussed, and the reason a rain-ruined Test at a suburban Gauteng ground ended up in every history of cricket corruption written since.

Boxing Day

Centurion's fixed point in the calendar is the Boxing Day Test. It is the ground's biggest crowd, its best commercial week, and the reason the venue matters to Cricket South Africa's finances rather than only to its cricket.

The slot has produced a series of consequential matches. On Boxing Day 2021 India won at Centurion for the first time, by 113 runs, with KL Rahul making 123 and Mohammed Shami taking five in an innings; Lungi Ngidi took six for 71 in reply and South Africa still lost, then recovered to win the series two-one. Two years later, on Boxing Day 2023, South Africa turned it round completely: Dean Elgar made 185, Kagiso Rabada took five for 59, and India were beaten by an innings and 32 runs inside four days.

The next instalment is already scheduled. England are due at Centurion for the Boxing Day Test of the 2026-27 tour, the middle match of a three-Test series that starts at the Wanderers and finishes in Cape Town. The wider fixture is covered in the guide to the South Africa and England rivalry.

India at Centurion

No touring side has a more interesting relationship with the ground. India lost here repeatedly before finally winning in 2021, and the two most recent Centurion Tests between the sides went one apiece in emphatic fashion — a 113-run Indian win followed by a South African win by an innings.

The reason the fixture produces results here rather than draws is straightforward. India tend to arrive in December with a batting order unfamiliar with Highveld pace and a bowling attack that, in the Bumrah and Shami era, was well equipped to exploit exactly what the surface offers. Both sides have found the first hour decisive, and both have lost a Test because of it. The longer history of the contest is in the guide to the South Africa and India rivalry.

The record book

Category	Mark	Detail
Highest Test total	621	South Africa against Sri Lanka, 2020-21 season
Highest individual Test score	208	Hashim Amla, 2014
Best Test innings bowling	7 for 29	Kyle Abbott, 2013
Best Test match bowling	13 for 144	Kagiso Rabada, 2016
First Test	November 1995	Against England; Shaun Pollock's debut
First one-day international	December 1992	Against India
First Twenty20 international	March 2009	Against Australia

Two of those deserve a note. Amla's 208 is the ground's benchmark batting performance and came from a player whose method — long occupation, minimal risk — is well suited to a venue where the danger is concentrated in the first session. And Rabada's thirteen wickets in a match came against England, at twenty-one, and remains among the best returns by a South African fast bowler anywhere.

The Titans, the Capitals and the rest of the season

The ground is busy well beyond its international fixtures.

The Titans have used it as their principal home since 2004, which makes it one of the two or three most important venues in the domestic first-class and limited-overs competitions. The Pretoria Capitals have played their SA20 home matches here since the league launched, and the short boundaries and altitude make it a natural fit for the format — the guide to the SA20 league covers how the franchise slots into the calendar, and the domestic competitions themselves are set out in the guide to South Africa's domestic cricket structure.

Centurion has also taken a share of every major tournament South Africa has hosted, including matches in the 2003 World Cup, the final of the 2009 Champions Trophy, and a block of matches including a semi-final when the Indian Premier League relocated to South Africa in 2009. It is the ground administrators reach for when Johannesburg is unavailable, and the one visiting broadcasters like because the light lasts.

Watching a Test there

A few practical points, none of them complicated.

• The grass banks are the best value and the best atmosphere. Bring something to sit on, arrive early on Boxing Day, and expect the slope to be full by mid-morning.
• The ground is in Centurion, between Pretoria and Johannesburg, and is reached most easily by car from either. Public transport in Gauteng does not serve it well.
• Plan for weather. A clear morning is not a forecast; Highveld storms build in the early afternoon and a Test day here can lose an hour without warning.
• Altitude affects spectators as well as cricket balls. The sun is stronger than it feels and shade on the banks is limited.

Centurion is also the easier of the two Highveld Tests to attend as a visitor. The Wanderers has the bigger reputation, the steeper stands and the more intimidating noise, and it is the ground overseas supporters put on their itinerary first. Centurion is flatter, more spread out, easier to park at and considerably more relaxed, and on a good Boxing Day it has as much atmosphere as anywhere in the country. Regulars tend to describe it as the ground you take a family to and the Wanderers as the one you go to for the cricket, which undersells the cricket played here.

The broader picture of the Gauteng game, including the club structure that feeds the Titans, is in the guide to cricket in Gauteng; the other Test venues are compared in the South African cricket grounds guide; and the rest of the country's cricket is indexed on the cricket in South Africa hub.

Sources and method

This guide draws on official ground and venue records for Centurion, on published elevation data for the town, on Test and one-day international scorecards for the matches described, and on contemporary reporting of the January 2000 Test and the subsequent admissions about it. Ground records are as compiled from official scorecards and can be superseded by any new match; capacity figures for South African venues shift with seating and hospitality changes and are given approximately. Descriptions of what the surface does are drawn from match records and published pitch assessments rather than from any measurement of our own, and nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.