Archive for the ‘People’ Category

After the performances in the group stages I think no one will be particularly suprised that England didn’t progress furhter than the last 16.  As I said earlier, I don’t mind if England lose as long as they try and in my opinion it looked like they tried against Germany, so I can’t complain.

Refereeing during the entire tournament has been sligtly suspect and the referee and his assistants made a huge mistake by not allowing the fantastic Lampard goal.  Did it alter the game, sure it did, England had to put more players forward to try and score more goals which in turn opened up their back end.   Still Germany did win, but I don’t think they will be this years winners.

So does this result have any impact on the games we’re seeing or fun time we’re having over here, none whatsoever.  We never managed to get tickets to an England game, and I sometimes wonder if the fans at England games would be quite as friendly as the fans have been at the other games.  We did witness our first bit of football violence yesterday at the Argentina vs Mexico game in Soccer City, where an Argentinian fan threw another Argentinian fan down a couple of rows in the stadium, from what we could see it was pretty much due to alcohol, but still not something you like to see.

I am continually impressed at how friendly the South African’s are, everyone of them seems to be on a campaign to have you return again in the future.

For the last few games I’ve been taking my Canon DSLR camera to the games with it’s zoom lens and have been trying to capture the faces of various fans and also in some cases non fans.  I think some of the pictures have come out great, and many I think illustrate the different emotions the fans can go through during a game. You can see all my photos on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/groups/vvorldcup/

Captain America caught talking time off for a pee at halftime during the USA Ghana match.

One of the things I have mentioned on the IdoNotes blog here is how this is a community event.  Global community.  Countries really do not matter when it comes to who you talk to, walk next to, stand next to our share a bag of crisps.

After the Ghana versus Germany game, we were honored to meet some wonderful South Africans that allowed us to do the following interviews. Carl did the first one, with Andy playing the instrumental.

Andy took on the second interview of a wonderful couple that has traveled the world. They even took time after to teach the Shosholoza song

Dear blog readers, after the fantastic news that USA and England got though to the last 16 (and the rather sad news that Germany qualified) things took a dramatic downward turn for Chris and I.   Unfortunately we were not keeping a close enough eye on Andy as we passed the street sellers and he is now a very proud owner of a VuVuZelas.  We are coming up with various plans to disable the device,  such as chili powder on the mouth piece, wall filler in the tube etc.   We’re hoping the locals may yet take care of the issue, and ban Andy from playing it as he is so poor at having it make a sound.  Sadly, Andy’s poor playing technique will just lead him to practicing more I think.