The World Cup is truly upon us. And wonder of all wonders,Bafana Bafana have not yet embarrassed us.
Most everyone is clearly excited about the soccer, even those who cannot tell a fullback or centre forward from a game ranger.
The World Cup is truly upon us. And wonder of all wonders,Bafana Bafana have not yet embarrassed us.
Most everyone is clearly excited about the soccer, even those who cannot tell a fullback or centre forward from a game ranger.
But there are some who have been souring the experience. First is the legion of foreign talking heads especially from Britain (think The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mirror and Sky News) which have been crying foul since South Africa won the right to host the Cup.
They went into overdrive when a few members of the pack were relieved of their cameras and press passes in their hotel rooms.
Then they went all mental when one of Nelson Mandela’s great-grand daughters died in a car accident. From the coverage, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that the little girl (rest in peace) was in the Bafana Bafana line-up.
When the opening ceremony went off without a hitch, and had higher attendance fi gures than the last two World Cups, the journos found other bad things to rant about especially the ubiquitous vuvuzela.
The noisy horn is clearly very loud. But to be fair, the vuvuzela is an equalopportunity offender. No one (including players and fans) can hear or talk above the din. Serious academics have also theorised, collected data and concluded in journal articles that on the whole World Cup will have a negative rather than positive impact on ordinary South Africans.
They point at the enormous cost of hosting, the disruption in lives, the displacement of established communities (like the informal settlements around King Shaka International Airport in KwaZulu-Natal) and Fifa’s strong-arm tactics to paint a rather bleak canvas of South Africa.But, as Rhodes University Dean of Humanities Prof Fred Hendricks declared a few weeks ago: “I feel good that I have tickets to attend some of the matches.
That cannot be a bad thing!” Prof Hendricks has a point. All haters should stop whinging and get on with the job at hand – on the pitch and in the stands.
World Cup soccer is one of those things that are there simply to be enjoyed. At Rhodes, working hours have been curtailed and managers asked to go easy on laggards, while more geeked up departments like Journalism and Media Studies have set up impromptu viewing areas.
It’s all good really. I’ve naturally caught one of the matches already, Greece vs South Korea in Port Elizabeth. True, only 31 150 of a possible 45 000 seats were fi lled.
True, there were more children than I ordinarily care for (this is not a Christmas party!) but the atmosphere was still electric.
I even caught out some Americans girls painted in Greece’s white and blue, but who jumped up when South Korea scored their second goal.
“Hey, I thought you were supporting us!” I lied, pretending to be a Greek supporter. “I forgot that we’d switched sides,” one of the girls lied back, giggling.
“We’re actually from the States, but shhhh!” A fi nal twist in the tale then: beware of Greeks bearing gifts. They could be Americans!
•Sim’s heart is with Bafana Bafana and his head is with Brazil.
