Mandy Rossouw takes up an offer of tickets for the Confederations Cup opening match and the experience is not all that pleasant
They say your first time is always the one you remember best. They often forget to add that it can be rather disappointing.
On Sunday, for the first time, I took to Johannesburg’s premier football venue. The occasion was the opening ceremony and accompanying match of the Confederations Cup, which, I’m told, is the most important sporting event on the planet for the next few weeks.
Hardly a sports fan myself, I was surprised when a friend offered me tickets, given that I don’t know Ellis Park from Johannesburg Stadium.
I do, however, remember watching a Super 12 (before it became Super 14) match at Ellis Park, but the free refreshments in the corporate suite got the better of me and my only memory was how I started shouting for the wrong team — their green shirts made me think they were the Springboks.
Back to the Confed Cup. So, on Sunday, my friends and I set off to the designated parking at the University of Witwatersrand, where we were supposed to park and take a bus to the stadium.
About 200m from the parking lot we got stuck in traffic. No worries, we thought, we’ll practise our singing and flag-waving skills. Also, it gave us time for last-minute shopping for items such as floppy hats from some informal traders on the pavement. I opted to practise the golden vuvuzela that completed our prop selection, but my friends gently took the instrument away from me. Turns out it is not as easy as it looks and my attempt was ruining our street cred.
We would even have had our first appearance on national television, but once the e.tv anchor prowling the car queue realised we were all journalists we lost our chance of momentary fame.
These activities took care of the first 20 minutes, during which we moved 20m. The rest of the hour and 15 minutes we sat sulking at the snail-like traffic, our only excitement being our neighbours in their pimped-up Audi A3s and BMWs who kept us entertained with their doef doef music.
At last we crawled into the parking lot, glad to finally be on our way to the stadium. Or so we thought. There were two queues serving two sets of buses, but both of them could easily match the post-global-meltdown Unemployment Insurance Fund queues.
When we finally reached the front, the two queues seemed to come together, but not in a friendly-merger-of-fans way. In this hostile takeover burly men shouted down the meek bus attendant, who was obviously just doing this job until her modelling career takes off.
Then they started pushing and blocking the bus from moving. For a few minutes things threatened to get hairy, but then another bus arrived and the moment passed. One guy mumbled ”this is Africa for you” — a comment that I normally answer with a long lecture on the racism and Afro-pessimism underlying such sentiments, but this time I had to settle for giving him a murderous look because we were pushing and shoving to get onto the bus.
At the stadium an interesting security system was at work. I can imagine the security supervisor that morning doing his checklist. Metal detectors? Check. Security guards in bright overcoats? Check. Fences to keep the queues in line? Check.
But all this meant nothing when the crowds arrived. Every person who walked through made the metal detector squeal, but everyone walked along happily without being stopped or searched.
The beverage kiosk was overrun by desperate football fans craving a boerewors-and-Budweiser-combo, but once you got to the front you were met by shrugging stewards: ”Sorry, the beer’s finished.” And a boerewors roll? Turns out there never were any.
Eventually we found some lukewarm beer and, ultimately, our seats as well. We sat down for what was expected to be a walkover game; surely Bafana wouldn’t let Iraq kick its butt? And thank goodness it didn’t. But only just. The game was so boring that we resorted to taking photographs with our cellphones. There was even enough time to load them on to Facebook and then read our friends’ comments about them.
After the first few attempts at goal-scoring that failed so miserably, I got some shuteye, right there in the stands, with the noise of the vuvuzelas accompanied by whistles that sound like babies crushed by a Metrobus wheel. Even the Mexican wave, which went around three times, did not manage to spur Bafana on to excellence. So we just gave up, like they seemed to have done. I didn’t even hear the final whistle, but almost automatically started filing out with the rest of the supporters, the air thick with disappointment.
If this is a dress rehearsal for the World Cup, it needs work — better actors, better props, better organisation and definitely a better script.