Tuesday 15th June

Zoo’s can be melancholy places can’t they? There was almost no-one around yesterday morning, and the place – acres and acres of it – was almost deserted. And the animals look almost as bored as the visitors. Still, there was a nice caff which was pleasant in the sunshine, although the weather has turned icy cold - ‘coming straight from the Antarctic, this is’ someone said to me.


Next to the Zoo is the SA Museum of Military History which has a comprehensive display on the Boer War, perhaps a bit too comprehensive if truth be told. 28,000 people died in the British concentration camps, there’s a fact no-one knows. Plus lots of military hardware, including a shot-down German fighter that crashed in Sussex but was transported to SA even before the war was ended for some reason, and some armoured vehicles with SA-relevant captions: ‘This vehicle was used in the Sharpeville massacre’: that sort of thing.

The game was at Ellis Park, right in the middle of town, so a completely different atmosphere to the previous games. You can see the city skyline, the floodlights in the distance and the lines of taillights along the motorway so it’s a bit like going to the Blues when I was a kid*. Plus absolutely freezing, so everyone was wrapped up in loads of layers, looking a bit more like a proper football crowd.

I had some excellent seats, right up at the top so I was looking forward to watching the Brazilians’ shifting patterns of play from on high with a slightly detached air. Except there was a cock up with the tickets and someone else had exactly the same ticket details as me, and we were both moved right down to the front in the third row. Among a load of completely madcrazybonkers people who acted the goat the whole time. There were Brazilians who had a three-foot replica of the World Cup, t here were people with silly hats who stood up the whole time despite being in the front row, and brandished a yellow card for every foul (how we laughed..), and the girls in front of me who fiddled with their hair and phones for ninety minutes and trilled ‘Ka-ka!!’ whenever he got the ball. I think when you are down at the front everyone is trying to get on telly, and to attract the attention of the photographers. And did I mention that it was our lot who were starting the Mexican waves? After five minutes?

So the Brazilians were pretty good although I believe they didn’t get a very good press. Quite a neat 4-2-3-1, much better than the Dutch play because the ‘water-carriers’, Silva and Melo, have a wider choice of players to give the ball to, with Robinho, Kaka and Elano in front of them. However they do have a tendency to fanny about a bit, and what penetration there was comes from the full backs, Bastos and Maicon – much the best players in the first half (hey, if there’s no rain, why do you need a Maicon?).

In the second half Brazil were kicking our way so my people were going nuts the whole time. Kaka seemed to move up which meant they played a slightly more conventional 4-4-2, although with the full backs still overlapping. I was right behind Maicon’s goal – Beautiful!. Then they started to play it round a bit more like 1982.

It was too cold to hang around too long after the match – they show the highlights and then the adverts at the end of the game, (My crowd actually joined in with the Coke advert...) and I usually wait till they have a sign saying Goodbye, but I had to go rescue the car.

Ah yes, Parking News.

Now the thing about pre-booked parking is that they are not supposed to let you into the ‘restricted zone’ without a pre-booked ticket. Which means that just on the edge of the zone, you get jumpy people leaping out in front of the car shouting ‘Safe Parking, Safe Parking!’ and waving madly. I’ve rather zipped past them muttering ‘Piss Off’ under my breath , but I realise now that they are going to lead your car into a nearby industrial space and charge you 50 rand, same as you’d pay FIFA. And not shoot you or get you to sleep with an Aids-raddled prostitute or anything bad at all. So I was put in a compound just outside the zone, and the guys there were jolly nice and the whole thing was all very good. And no hanging around for an hour eating crisps while the jams went down, I was straight off and away, with the knowledge I was doing my bit for the poor people. I told the guy there to reserve me a space on Friday.

*may not be true