Gary Benham

230 days to go - the future's bright .......

My relative blog silence is due to the fact that we've just hosted a whirl wind visit from Kevin "Air" Miles of the Football Supporters Federation (FSF).

The FSF will publish a free guide to WC2010 for those fans making the trip.  Kevin's trip has helped him build contacts, gather relevant information and find out for himself what the situation is really like on the ground.  We managed to secure meetings with the Local Organising Committee, city venue managers (for Tshwane (Pretoria) and Rustenburg) and senior FIFA and "Match" Officials.  Kevin met several members of the High Commission team. 

We also included several media opportunities in his programme - after an appearance on SuperSports' "Monday Night Football" Kevin received emails from Zimbabwe and was recognised in a restaurant in Jo'Burg.  I'll post more on Kevin's visit in the weeks to come but I wanted to share a very bizarre conversation we had when we visited Soccer City, the venue for the opening ceremony on 11 June and the final on 11 July.

 Soccer City - Jo'Burg

The stadium is very near completion.  The pitch is growing, although it looks rather small in in the context of the huge seating area in which the seats have been installed.  The vast majority of the seats are orange.  Until this week I assumed that this was because the stadium would become home to the Kaiser Chiefs team post WC2010.  Not the case .......

Kevin, Football Laision Officer Jo Bowyer and I had the chance to go into the stands and promptly took a seat to take in the stunning vista before us.  It was not long before a high vis jacketed construction worker came over to us to ask that we don't sit on the seats.  They have, he told us, had to replace 8,000 seat units so far which at a cost of 500R each adds up.

We asked why this had been necessary.  It would appear that behind "powder puff blue" and "baby pink" orange is the thrid worst colour to install as stadium seating.  We were told that some seats had faded, some had had paint spilt on them, some had been knicked and some had broken when sat on!  I'm no builder but there might be a suggestion of design flaw here! 

If orange was not a good colour for seating we wondered why it had been chosen.  Apparently there was no specification made on seat colour when the tender was awarded.  There have been rumours that the architect is Dutch but our yellow vested friend told us that this was not the case.  What ever the reason the stadium looks stunning in all its orange glory.  Whether or not the future will be orange, rather than a faded version of it, remains to be seen!

More next week.  

Posted at 09:25 23 October 2009 by Gary Benham  |  Comments[0]