Long before they reached Soccer City, the fans had already started to party. As they sat in slow-moving traffic jams on the road to the stadium, they leapt out of their vehicles and began dancing in the streets, blowing their vuvuzelas loudly at every nearby car.
This was a historic moment: the first time South Africa’s national soccer team was playing a match at the newly expanded Soccer City, where the World Cup will kick off next month. And the fans were in a mood to celebrate. After years of preparations, the World Cup is about to begin.
The match between South Africa and Colombia was a friendly, so it didn’t count for anything official. But you’d never know it from the mood of excitement among the 75,000 fans at Soccer City on Thursday night. They made so much noise that it sounded like an explosion. It drowned out the match announcer, reverberated around the stadium, and deafened anyone within range of a vuvuzela (the long plastic trumpet that South Africans favor).
South African fans watch national soccer team Bafana Bafana play a friendly match against Colombia at Soccer City in Soweto, a World Cup stadium that will host the first game of the championships on June 11, 2010. Photo by Erin Conway-Smith
Soccer City, closed for renovations for the past three years, has only been unveiled to the public over the past few days. So far it seems to be an overwhelming success: a gorgeous edifice, in the shape of a traditional African cooking pot, with up to 94,000 seats in some configurations, making it the biggest stadium in Africa.
A full moon hung in the sky above the stadium on Thursday night, making it an even more beautiful scene.
The 75,000 fans at Soccer City were an incredibly multi-racial mixture. They were South Africans of every color and race. This is significant because South African sports are traditionally divided among the racial groups, with Afrikaners religiously supporting rugby and blacks fanatically following soccer. Most sports events here are racially homogeneous, and the lines are rarely crossed.
The World Cup, in one dramatic swoop, is erasing those divisions. Blacks and whites – along with Asians and mixed-race people – are all equally thrilled about the World Cup. And to prove that point, the 75,000 people at the Soccer City match were a perfect microcosm of the country, with thousands of fans from every ethnic group. The World Cup will unite the country as few events have ever done before.
To top it off, South Africa beat Colombia by a 2-1 score, leaving the crowd ecstatic. The national team, known as Bafana Bafana (“The Boys”), is now undefeated in its past 10 matches. It’s an unusual stretch of success for Bafana Bafana, one of the lowest-ranked teams in the World Cup and often an object of derision among South Africans themselves. It offered hope, for the first time, that South Africa might astonish everyone and advance out of the first round.
Despite the excitement, the match confirmed that there are still many problems to be resolved before the World Cup begins on June 11. Traffic around the stadium was chaotic, with fans stuck in traffic jams for hours and then abandoning their cars on the side of the road. The entrances to the stadium were equally chaotic. Security guards were supposed to check each fan with metal detectors, but they were so overwhelmed that they merely waved their wands briefly at every second or third person. Crowds knocked down the flimsy fences that were supposed to channel them into the stadium. Concrete ramps and bridges to the stadium seemed dangerously narrow.
Inside the stadium, there was no sign of any ushers or guides. Crowd control was non-existent. There was nobody to help anyone find their seat or section. Ultimately most fans did not even bother to sit in their assigned sections, and nobody stopped them. The food inside the stadium was sold out before the end of the first half. And the scoreboard clock stopped working, so nobody knew how much time was left in the match.
Yet in the end, all of these seemed like minor quibbles. The extraordinary enthusiasm of the South Africans is what will be remembered at the end of this World Cup.
