The Greatest World Cup Ever
With high-tech grounds, plenty to do between games and – whisper it – the possibility of England making it past the group stage, the first African World Cup really could be the best ever, says Barney Ronay
Just in case you’ve been buried beneath a giant rock and managed to miss out on the wave of giddy victory, something quite major happened in England in early September. The national team qualified for a spot at next summer’s World Cup in South Africa not shakily or iffily or nail-bitingly, but – in a break from tradition – handsomely, decisively and with a swagger.
This is, of course, good news for England’s footballers, as well as for their unusually competent manager, Fabio Capello. But it’s perhaps even better news for the host nation, in particular its hoteliers, restaurateurs, taxi drivers, shark-cage diving instructors, roadside lager vendors and World Cup budgeting wonks. This is mainly because the England team brings with it an unrivalled travelling army of supporters: up to 100,000 people will make the trip in June and July, completing a year of almost non-stop sporting traffic between Britain and South Africa, following the Lions rugby tour in June and the English cricket team’s five-Test tour in November.
Needless to say, it is also fantastic news for anyone with a nylon three-lions replica shirt in their wardrobe who might be thinking of getting on a plane and heading to one of big-time sport’s most hospitable host nations. Here are just six reasons why:
NO ONE DOES SPORT QUITE LIKE SOUTH AFRICA
There is simply no place like it on earth to watch men chasing a ball around. Sport in South Africa always has an epic, widescreen feel. Sport, for example, was a major signpost of the apartheid era: sporting exile began at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics and ended in 1992, three years before the staging of the Rugby World Cup seemed to complete South Africa’s re-emergence, embodied by Nelson Mandela’s appearance in a Springbok shirt – symbol of white Afrikaner identity – to present the trophy.
In a way, the football World Cup is even more significant. Football is the black South African game, the game of the townships. However, oddly, it’s the team’s sole white player and cult popular hero Matthew Booth, a 6ft 6in bald central defender married to Sonia Bonneventia, a Soweto-born ex-supermodel, who is all set to become the unlikely global poster boy. But, either way, this seems certain to be a richly textured and unusually involving global sporting beano.
IT’S NOT GOING TO BE A DISASTER
Don’t believe the hype. Ignore the mutterings. Shun the naysayers. We were told that the Olympic Games in Beijing would be obscured by smog, hamstrung by censorship and strangled by a giant aquatic pondweed infestation. The Athens Games were supposed to have taken place on a building site. With the recent trend towards staging events outside the established centres creating a cycle of casual Google-led hysteria in the media, a World Cup in Africa was always going to attract trembling premonitions of meltdown and collapse. Crime stats have been gleefully trumpeted. Construction-worker strikes have been bewailed. But still, South Africa continues to surprise.
As its chief World Cup organiser, Danny Jordaan, likes to point out, this is a country that has now staged 146 major events, including the cricket and rugby world cups. Plus there’s the sheer scale of the World Cup security operation: 50,000 new police officers have been drummed up. Guides and stewards will throng the streets. Robot security drones will screech across the skies. And, as of October, nine out of 10 new World Cup stadiums will be ready ahead of schedule. South Africa takes this stuff seriously. They want you to have a good time. And, frankly, they’re not going to stop until you do.
IT’S A FIRST FOR AFRICA
The World Cup will be an African occasion, above all. The continent has never hosted anything like this, with up to 500,000 people due to make the trip and hundreds of millions more watching via satellite. Past World Cups may have been a showcase for Belgium to demonstrate how efficient its train network is, or Germany to sell a few million more Bierwurst. Africa has an opportunity to challenge the entire notion of what a World Cup is supposed to look and feel like. Even the weather will be large-scale and epic, with huge variation between the winter frosts on the Highveld and the year-round beachiness of the coasts.
South Africa is also over three times the size of the previous host, Germany. But the distances between host cities needn’t be a drag. As the Lions tour showed, travel is part of the experience: embrace the winery tour and the game-park detour. You don’t need to wander off the well-stewarded path to find yourself in the middle of something completely different.
THERE ARE NO CHEAP SEATS
Never mind splendid landscapes, or the chance to feel slightly frightened by a rhino. South Africa’s 10 billion rand (£850 million) shiny new sporting infrastructure will provide some equally spectacular feats of high-end engineering, a crash course in space-age roof cantilevers and hyper-ergonomic seating stack.
Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium is designed to look like an African cooking pot, with a ring of lights running the bottom to rememble fire underneath, while the stadium in Nelspruit sits winched up on 16 giraffe-shaped metal pylons. Green Point in Cape Town looks like an enormous upturned calico sewing box, and will provide the broadcasters’ illuminated super-stadium money shot with Table Mountain looming in the background. Best of all, perhaps, the 45,000-capacity Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane actually backs onto a game reserve, giving punters an alternative view of the local leopard population during that slow period in the second half of South Korea against Ecuador.
THERE’S ALMOST TOO MUCH OTHER STUFF TO DO
Downtime can be a problem when you’re spectating. Too often, the hours between watching England’s footballers trot around looking confused on a Wednesday and then looking tired and fearful on a Sunday can drag, idle moments usually passed milling around an interchangeable Central European shopping district or becoming violently sunburned in the central square of a small French market town.
No such problems in South Africa. Cape Town is the funhouse and gastronomic centre – which, to be fair, doesn’t involve much more than occasionally providing something other than A-grade barbecued steak. Then there’s wine: tours of Stellenbosch and the like are often built into rugby and cricket itineraries. Elsewhere, Johannesburg is Africa’s richest city and a shopping Mecca, Port Elizabeth has 50km of temperate coastline, and Durban claims to have the best curry outside India. Just watch out for the Bunny Chow: a scooped out half-loaf of bread filled with curry. Not to be taken on lightly.
ALSO, ENGLAND ARE GOING TO WIN THE WORLD CUP
And the cricket, too. Of course they are. What could possibly go wrong? Now get packing.
GETTING THERE
For more about World Cup travel packages, visit your local Thomas Cook or Going Places store, call Thomas Cook Sport on +44 (0)870 752 0924, visit www.thomascooksport.com or tune in to Thomas Cook TV on Sky channel 655
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