World Cup fans reach fever pitch

CAPE TOWN // Everywhere you go in this city, you know the score. From fan parks to hotels, cafes to petrol stations, the whole place is buzzing. Visitors and locals alike are caught up in the excitement. "The games are on television everywhere," Thera Dunga, a petrol station attendant in the suburb of Somerset West, said. "We're watching every game and I'm even coming in on my days off just to watch the matches with my friends."

There is similar excitement in Port Elizabeth and Durban, the other southern cities hosting matches. They may be hundreds of kilometres from the majority of the action in the northern part of the country, but the atmosphere here is just as electric. "I honestly thought there was going to be a stampede before South Africa's opening game with Mexico," said Andre Lammers, whose Cape Town apartment overlooks the city's principal fan park. "The number of people wanting [to get into the fan park] was huge and officials had to turn thousands of disappointed people away."

Rugby is the dominant sport in this part of the country, but even people with no previous interest in the game they call "soccer" can relay information about the progress of unheralded nations such as Slovakia, New Zealand and Serbia. "I've always been a rugby fan, soccer wasn't really my thing," Steve Trollope, a Cape Town businessman, said. "But since the World Cup started I've found it impossible not to follow the action and although it was a shame the Bafana Bafana went out, everyone in the country has turned their allegiance to another team."

The story is much the same in Port Elizabeth, where the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium has transformed the city's seafront. "We ordered all our staff a Bafana Bafana shirt with our company's logo on the front before the tournament," said Chris Collett, who runs a cement supplies business that provided much of the stadium's foundations. "The reaction was like nothing I expected. Our staff were ecstatic and production levels shot up. When the tournament started, performance dipped, as we expected. But long live the World Cup."

Visiting fans have enjoyed the atmosphere, and the hospitality. Jarod Nuemann, an England-supporting Canadian, was wearing a Dutch shirt for Holland's clash with Cameroon in Cape Town. His experience had made him think again about South Africa's high crime rates. "I left my bag on a bus in Durban and after eventually tracking down the same bus in the depot the driver came up to me and told me he had my bag," Nuemann said. "I'm thrilled to say that everyone in the country has embraced the World Cup and I couldn't feel any safer."

Businesses are doing their best to leverage World Cup fever."Our business has shot up massively," Ramona Reddy, the manager of Astor House, a Durban guesthouse, said. "We go from having two or three rooms occupied to being fully booked on match days. "People who aren't even going to games are buzzing. Even supermarkets are noisy with vuvuzelas. It is amazing." [e-mail]