The World Cup kicks off in Soccer City Stadium in ten days and your faithful scribe could not be more excited. I will be leaving in a week and after a night in Addis Ababa will land in Johennesburg with what I hope will be enough time to scramble to my b&b, drop my stuff off, and head somewhere to watch Bafana Bafana take on Mexico’s El Tri in a match that will not only represent one of the most symbolically resonant moments in South African history, but that will also have key implications for Group A.
South Africans are really gearing up for the next few weeks. This is their chance to shine, and shine they will. Indeed I think the spirit of South Africa’s people will make this one of the most compelling World Cups in the history of global football’s showcase event.
Some 300,000 fans are expected to descend upon South Africa over the course of the World Cup. Only 2% of the tickets sold have been to Africans from outside of the country, so the vast majority of these tourists will come from the United States and Europe. I expect that a good deal of the narrative about the event off the pitch will be about the difficulties these tourists will have in dealing with a host of issues. The subtext will be a constant assessment of how well South Africa is doing, a burden that is almost never applied to other countries when they host global events. The reality is that many of the stories we will see will hint that the trouble is with South African infrastructure when many of the problems will in fact be with poor planning on the part of people who do not know or understand how things work in South Africa. (Oh, and for your convenience, here is a good currency conversion website. As of today the rand is worth about 7.7 to the dollar and 11.3 to the pound.)
Transportation will be a problem for some from time to time. Well, South Africa is a lot bigger than most people think. Plan ahead. Give yourselves plenty of time. Expect that things will occasionally go awry. One of the infrastructural developments that the World Cup has brought to South Africa is the completion of the long-awaited Gautrain, which will connect part of the Pretoria-Johannesburg axis access to the airport via high-speed rail, though the beneficiaries of the train will almost wholly be middle class suburbanites rather than the urban masses.
Crime will be another ubiquitous meta-narrative during the World Cup. The realities are that while crime continues to be a problem in South Africa, tourists are largely spared, and that will be even more the case during the Cup, which will see a heightening of police and other security precisely because of the crime narrative. At some point there may be a high-profile attack on one of South Africa’s guests, and this will prove all of the hand-wringing to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But generally speaking, tourists who are smart and who don’t take risks and who take the same precautions as they would traveling anywhere else in the world will find South Africa to be wonderful. Now, that does not mean that there won’t be lots of folks trying to find a way to separate fools and naifs from their money, but such opportunism is hardly limited to South Africa. High-profile crimes involving visiting teams will especially gain traction.
And then of course there are fears of terrorism. We’ll hear plenty about shady and vague plans of terrorist attacks in South Africa in June and July. Denial will prove nothing evil doers! After all — denial is exactly what we expect from terrorists! The narrative of a potential terrorist attack, somehow more frightening because of the utter lack of specifics, is already unspooling. But just keep in mind that every major event since September 2001 has inspired soothsayers of doom. Could something happen? Sure. Never rule anything out. There are truly bad people out there who want to do harm to the west. In the meantime, though, keep in mind that the only successful terrorist attack at a major sporting event in the last fifteen years took place in Atlanta at the Olympics in 1996. Terrible things can happen anywhere. Don’t think of South Africa, which has experienced virtually no Islamic extremism, as being any more vulnerable than wherever you are reading this right now.
As for that Bafana Bafana clash with Mexico? I still think the hosts, who have played quite well of late, but have also experienced some controversy over final World Cup roster selections, win. It feels like a complete sham that France, which entered the tournament under a deluge of controversy due to its dubious qualifying, somehow managed to gain entry into South Africa’s bracket, which was shaping up as a very friendly one. The French did not earn one of the top seeds and so should have been at the mercy of the draw and of rights ended up in a group of death yet somehow ended up as a de facto top seed anyhow. As a result the South Africa-Mexico game will have all of the atmosphere of an elimination game — if one of them loses their path to the knockout rounds becomes nearly impossible. The South African team knows this will be their stage. It will be their World Cup for those 90 minutes. And there will be 94,000+ in Soccer City Stadium cheering them on to victory. (I’ll weigh in more on the tournament more broadly down the road.)
