As most of you who read this blog regularly know, I have been shamelessly bullish on the prospects of South Africa succeeding in hosting a wonderful World Cup that will bring glory to the nation. But I also knew all along that there would be hiccups. The England-US game on Saturday, great as it was for the Americans who were able to watch the Yanks pull off a 1-1 tie that seemed a lot like a victory to the Americans and a defeat for the Three Lions.
It makes a great deal of sense to hold games in Pretoria and Cape Town, Joburg and Durban. Rustenburg? Not as much. Of course South Africa and the organizers want as much of the country to share in the bounty and spectacle as possible. But Rustenburg is just a bit of a mystifying location for World Cup games, something that became all the more clear as the day progressed. I would venture that a healthy minority of the attendees at that game drove in from Gauteng. Which meant that a huge percentage of people came in vans and buses, as part of a shuttle, as I did. Yet when we got off the shuttle bus that ferried us from the parking lot, no effort was made to make clear which parking lot we’d been in (it was unlabeled) and which buses would take us back, and from where. This did not seem like a huge problem at first. It ended up being the problem of the night.
The Stadium is nice, but I cannot help but wonder if it won’t end up as a bit of a white elephant given its location. I’m sure it will host soccer and rugby matches, and there is a track around the pitch, so it can serve that purpose as well. The seats (40,000 or so) are almost right on the field, and without the track fans in the second deck would have been able to breathe down the necks of the coaches and players. For a major matchup — one of the premiere pairings of the group stages — of the world’s biggest sporting events, you’d have thought they would have had the basics of stadium operation figured out. You’d have thought wrong. For the entirety of the game neither scoreboard worked on either end of the stadium. And from what I could tell there were only two concessions stands for the entire facility, and they were mobbed, making it nearly impossible to get food or drink and still see all of the action in the game.
Tim Howard dominated, England let in a soft goal, and the draw meant that while both teams are on pace to advance, they also will have to win at least one and likely both of their remaining games to be assured of moving on to the knockout stages. The crowd was good, but since Americans and Brits make up the largest contingent of visitors this month, it meant that this was one of the least vuvuzela-laden crowds of the whole tournament, and not that it matters, but also the whitest.
After the game is when a clear lack of logistical planning came clear. Almost no one knew which bus they were to take. Chaos reigned, and as the hours passed and people still were amassed waiting for buses whose ultimate destination was unclear, tempers flared. I ended up meeting with my own group two hours after everyone else got back, much to everyone’s chagrin and my embarrassment, and we got back to Joburg at around 5 in the morning. And we were far from the last to get out of Rustenburg. I expect that they will improve the logistics for the next games there, but lots of people got a terrible introduction to South Africa during that game, and it was perhaps the worst possible group to get that experience, as neither Americans nor the English are especially well known for the gracious way that they take things going wrong when they are abroad. And in this case, no one can blame the people who found themselves still awaiting buses two hours after the stadium had emptied.
Some problems that have emerf=ged are not, however, the fault of the local organizers. FIFA really seems to have mismanaged the ticketing distribution in some ways. I got in on Friday and headed straight to my guesthouse. I did not pick up match tickets at the airport, thinking that the flight delay had inconvenienced the driver who picked me up enough. But there are very few places to pick up tickets. And so I went to the game assuming that there would be a place to get tickets. There was, but it was out of the way to the point where even the workers at the stadium, even their managers, had no idea how it worked. While everyone else enjoyed the pregame festivities, I spent well more than an hour trying to get a ticket to the game. That is simply absurd. And then when I got there, they could not give me all of my tickets, just my ducat for that game, meaning I had to make a separate trip into Sandton the next day before I went to Pretoria for the Ghana-Serbia game. And while that process went smoothly, it also is an absurd process.
In any case, I suspect that to be the worst of the experiences I will have in terms of organizational chaos. And in the end, the United States did manage to draw with England, whose goalie woes continue to haunt their tortured country’s souls. I will be at Friday’s US-Slovenia game at Ellis Park in Joburg, and that is now a huge match, and presents a real opportunity for the American side. Ellis Park, at least, knows how to host a major event, and so the emphasis will certainly be on the pre-game environment, the competition on the pitch, and, I hope, the post-game celebrations at the stadium and all the way back to Melville.