Confederations Cup Diary: Soccer City and why John Terry can't jump

Internationals / Jonathan Wilson / 20 June 2009 / Leave a comment

Jonathan Wilson tells us about why the Soccer City stadium looks the way it does, Arsene Wenger and Cristiano Ronaldo's useless insight and how Marcel Desailly has ruffled a few feathers.

They claim Soccer City, the 90,000-seater stadium near Soweto that will host the World Cup final next July will be ready by the end of September. And perhaps it will, although there is still much work to be done. There are numerous tiles still to be fitted in to one side of the brown and white façade, which has been designed to resemble African pottery, 9,000 seats still to be screwed in place and 4.5million bricks to be laid, but it already looks highly impressive.

There are nice design touches too, sparks of personality that will give it an identity. Spaces will be left in the facade for 64 tiles to be added during the tournament, recording the score and details of each game. Within the ground, the bowl of orange seats is cut through with ten apparently randomly arranged grey streaks. Each points to one of the other World Cup venues, but as there are nine, an unlucky number in African mythology, a tenth has been added pointing to Berlin, where the World Cup final was played in 2006. At the end of the tournament, plaques will be mounted at the base of the stands detailing the matches played in each venue.

That, at least, is the positive view. There are, it is important to remember, dissenters, such as the Afrikaner bus driver who pointed out that the stadium reminds him less of pottery than of the "necklaces" - the burning tyres thugs fitted over the necks of their victims in the
early nineties. Many of those attacks happened in Soweto, which stands near the stadium, on the other side of the vast slag-heaps left by the gold-mining that initially made Johannesburg its fortune. The heaps themselves, great long triangular mountains, are being reworked to remove the last remaining gold, and will probably have disappeared within the next ten years.

With no games yesterday, a tour of Soccer City was the highlight, after a lunch with Marcel Desailly, who is one of Castrol's ambassadors as they seek to promote their index for determining who the best performing players at the tournament are: David Villa ([3.15]
to be top-scorer) and Fernando Torres ([1.66]) are numbers one and two at the moment.

Desailly gave the less than startling prediction that Spain [2.12] or Brazil [2.56] are his favourites to win the Confederations Cup, a view repeated in tones of great earnestness by both Arsene Wenger and Cristiano Ronaldo speaking via videos recorded before the tournament. Who'd have expected that? Thanks goodness we have famous people to explain these things to us. Ronaldo also then listed about a dozen candidates to be the best player in the world (himself included), including none in the list from Real Madrid.

The same three pundits then tipped the same pair for the World Cup (Spain are [5.9] to win, Brazil [6.2]), with Wenger adding England ([10.0]) and Argentina ([6.6]) as outsiders. With rather more diplomacy than common sense, Desailly also claimed that South Africa ([160.0]) will be in with a chance. They won't.

They need at least a point against Spain this afternoon to be assured of finishing second in a group comprising Iraq and New Zealand (they are [3.2] to draw; [7.0] to win). Being seeded will help them, but it would still be a major achievement if they manage to get through the group,
and so avoid being the first hosts to suffer the ignominy of going out in the first round.

Desailly also made the quite extraordinary claim that John Terry is a poor header of the ball because he always jumps off two feet. That both seems improbable, given Terry's great undoubted strength is his aerial ability, and astonishingly out of character for an event like Castrol launch. On these occasions people are always rolling out grand new visions, creating synergy between brands and engaging in all manner of other business/motivational mumbo jumbo, and offering little in the way of opinion, still less controversial opinion.

And again, we had the mystery of the absence of coffee. The food was excellent, there were various fruit juices, wines and beer, and there was even fudge and Turkish delight to finish with, but of coffee there was no sign. What is it about this country?