Archie Henderson: This is hard, but it's time to say goodbye to Newlands.

Not because the Sepp Blatter Memorial stadium in Green Point is an appealing alternative. It's that the spanking new ground has mortgaged the future of Cape Town's children - and probably their children - and rugby is the only way to make the place pay.

So the people at Western Province rugby should shove their pride and tradition, sell off the Grand Old Lady and shift to the other side of the mountain.

The new baby, built on the whim of a soccer boss and, by coincidence, on the site where football was first played in South Africa, looked in rude health on Saturday. For the first time in history, a big rugby game in the city was not played at Newlands. The mountain did not move, nor did the sea swallow up Cape Town.

The change, however, will be wrenching. No longer will Saturday's match be just a gentle stroll from Olympics or Forries. Smaller establishments will go to the wall and schools in the area will have to sack teachers when they lose the income from parking on their fields.

But the change is inevitable, and not all bad. Newlands comes with its baggage of segregation whereas the new stadium's crowd reflected a diversity on Saturday that was refreshingly spontaneous.

Still, there will be howls of protest and weeping nostalgia when the move is made.

It has been a favourite ground ever since I lived 100 yards down the road and could check the match scores from my balcony, before the Jan Pickard stadium spoiled the view.

In those days, you would watch a wonderful array of rugby talent, with five club games on the programme (two of them on the B ground where the Sports Science Institute now stands). If Maties were playing Villagers in the main game at 4pm, it was not unusual to pack the place out.

The press box nestled in the lower grandstand, cheek by jowl with the prime season ticket-holders. Over years, we got to know them, watched them grow old and indulged their crackpot opinions.

In the box itself, the views were no less eccentric and the refreshments, appropriately, fruitcake. The cake was rumoured to have been a redundant consignment bought for the wedding of a spinster who ran Western Province rugby along with her equally authoritarian boss, Piet Lombard.

Of the characters who inhabited the place, none was larger, in life as well as figure, than AC Parker. Dressed like an undertaker and burdened by typewriter and a week's worth of newspapers, he would start banging away at the little portable almost as soon as he'd taken his seat. Having to provide what we call "running copy" for an unforgiving series of deadlines at the Saturday Argus, AC's first sentence invariably began: "Western Province kicked off into a stiff breeze ..."

Alongside sat his "eyes", Norman East. Both men wore hats, already an item out of fashion. Norman watched while AC typed. Norman not only helped AC identify who kicked, passed or tackled, but also fitted in loud abuse directed at the referee. He did not do much for the press box's alleged dispassion.

While Norman watched and AC typed, behind them - and protected from the wind and the noise by a glass enclosure - sat the third member of the team, Herbie Fruitgo. It was Herbie's job to read AC's copy to a dictate typist back at the office.

In an era before TV, AC Parker's reports were devoured by Cape Town's rugby public. Today, it's a different ball game and it needs a different venue. Even though the old team will turn in their graves.