Dave and Dad are…
At the FIFA 2010 World Cup Draw.
The World Cup Final Draw is really the last big event before the Cup itself kicks off in June. It’s at this point that the teams find out what group they are in and who their opponents will be in the group stage. For a lot of teams, the draw (so called cause groups are chosen lottery ball style) in effect determines if they will advance to the knockout stages. In 2006 for example the US drew into a “group of death” with Italy, Czech Republic and Ghana and got bounced out of the Cup within five minutes of the first whistle (fucking Claudio Reyna).
There are eight groups, with one of the eight top seeded teams in each and the rest are drawn from the buckets. For the US, while the team is much stronger than the 06 squad, the draw is still critical, and there has been a lot of nerves because the way the draw is set up the chances of us drawing into another stacked group is fairly high.
The draw itself is an hour and a half long extravaganza taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Center. You can’t get into that without being an invited VIP, but Cape Town has gone all out to create areas for fans to be a part of it. (Cape Town did not host a Confederations Cup match this summer because Green Point Stadium wasn’t complete and the city is too far from Jo’burg, so the Draw is the only big lead-up event the town gets.)
So Long Street is closed off for a massive fan festival. In addition to live broadcasting the draw at 630, the festival is featuring performances all day including Freshly Ground, Jimmy Dludlu, K’naan and a newly reunited TKZee (they of the 1998 South African football rap anthem Skibob, which features not only Bafana Bafana striker Benni McCarthy on guest vocals, but also samples Europe’s The Final Countdown, instantly making it the greatest rap song of all time.)
Seeing as how I will be back in the States studying for the bar exam when the Cup happens next year this is as close as I am gonna get to it so I have been really excited for the draw for weeks. I told the man before he came out that we had to do this, didn’t really expect him to be too enthused, as per usual when traveling the man surprised me. He really elevates his sense of adventure when outside Applebee’s zone of influence. I mean look at him, he really threw himself into it.
In fact, cause I had to go have one last Gatsby with my office, he was on the ground at the fan festival long before I was. In fact he got to watch Freshly Ground’s sound check which I was pretty jealous about.
The Old Man gets frisked yet again.
Getting through security once again proved much harder for the Old Man that me, but once in we had no trouble moving down towards the heart of the action. Now the stage was set up at the end of Long Street, with a couple (but not enough) large video screens stretching back down the block. When we got in around 3:30 it was already packed from the stage to almost the second screen. Seeing as neither me or my dad like being squashed in crowds, and a lot of people would be trying to join us later we decided to station ourselves in front of the second, and farthest out video screen. Close enough to be right in the mix see and hear everything but far enough out that the we could go grab beers from the sidewalk beer stands without having to muscle through the masses.
It ended up working out really well. While the crowd definitely filled in substantially we were never in a sardine situation and we managed to add Jana, Matt, Kate, Mei Li, Zana, Veounia and a friend of hers by the time the big name groups started their sets.
TKZee ruled. I mean, rap live is generally not awesome, and the sound wasn’t great for them, but hearing Skibob live was pretty awesome. And the crowd was loving the all too appropriate soccer anthem.
Bafana Bafana’s youngest, and cutest twin fans.
K’naan was REALLY good. I remember reading a Village Voice peace about this Somali born rapper back in the spring when his album Troubadour came out and thinking he sounded fascinating. I added the album to my “to get” list but never got around to it. His whole set was good and the crowd went pretty crazy for his Waving the Flag song, which I believe is the official song of the Cup. (Editor’s note: Last week I got the album and I don’t think I have listened to a single other artist since. I don’t know how this didn’t get album of the year in every poll over that Animal Collective nonsense. It’s incredible. One song is all about the joy of getting money sent to you Western Union when you’re flat broke. Fuck all the thug life rappers “keeping it real”, that’s street cred.)
Freshly Ground, the band I was most excited to see ended up playing barely twenty minutes which was really surprising as they were the second biggest name on the bill. I think it got chopped cause they were behind and running up on the draw but still a bummer.
The Draw itself was a lot of fun, though also pretty terrible. The first forty-five minutes were absolutely awful as there were the usual range of speeches by Zuma and Sepp Blatter, a videotaped message from Mandela and just a terrible terrible hosting job by South African goddess Charlize Theron. She clearly had no idea about football or the Cup, was not particularly smooth in her pre-written banter and inexplicably spoke in an American accent (the newspapers slammed her on this the next day). I stood through this all desperate to piss but not wanting to miss the US draw. Had I known this nonsense was gonna take three quarters an hour I could’ve relieved my bladder four or five times.
But finally they got to the draw. There were four balls of plastic easter eggs and sports stars like David Beckham (another strange haircut decision), Jan Smit (SA rugby captain and national hero), Matthew Booth (BOOOOOOTH, SA’s stalwart national team defender and wearer of a disturbing looking leather suit) as well as a couple I didn’t know, drew the teams.
Kinda have to question the Old Man’s patriotism. That’s a lot of non-American flags he’s wearing.
Man the tension and excitement during the actual draw was exhilarating. South Africa got creamed on their group. By far the weakest non-New Zealand side in the tourney (they got in only cause they are hosting) they needed a big break in the draw to avoid being the first host to not get out of the group stage. They didn’t get it. France is old and had to cheat to get in but they will dispatch SA unless Bafana Bafana get inspired and Mexico and Uruguay should be able to handle them no problem.
Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions made themselves known up and down the block. Eto’oooooooo!
The US made out pretty well. We were the first team drawn in England’s group (England being seeded). That got quite a pop out of the crowd. I was definitely screaming. Not only is US v England an awesome, awesome marquee matchup, but England, even with Capello’s genius coaching them perpetually struggle with getting all their superstars to work together on the pitch. And with Algeria we avoided one of the African powerhouses. That’s what I was really sweating. Getting a group with a top 8 side PLUS a Cameroon, Ivory Coast or Ghana would have been damn near a death knell. Toss in Slovenia, no slouch, but not one of those floating European powerhouses that fell just out of the seeding and we really couldn’t be better off without drawing SA or the Kiwis.
Tremendous outpouring of African unity. With SA highly unlikely to make it out of the group stages everyone seems to have decided to support all of Africa’s participants in the Cup.
And overall the groups shook out pretty good. There isn’t really any obvious group of death, though I feel strongly for the Indomitable Lions (Cameroon) and Elephants (Ivory Coast), both tremendous teams who drew a pretty tough sched. Hopefully they managed to claw their way out of the group rounds cause I really feel that after Brazil and Spain every team has some serious questions so the knock rounds could be wide open.
I will say though that Italy did get intolerably lucky. After only making it out of the 06 group stages by cheating (Seriously, they beat a very game Australia team after Grosso dove in the box. Replays clearly showed that Lucas Neil’s slide tackle missed him completely). After that they made it all the way to the finals and suckered Zidane into a headbutt and that was all she wrote. Now even older, the already oldest team in the tourney got unfairly seeded (because seeding is in large part based on success in the last Cup instead of current performance) and drew by far the easiest group. New Zealand??? Slovakia? Paraguay? The latter two aren’t slouches but won’t make you rattle in your boots. And if I were Kiwi I could try out for that team. Sigh. I pray Italy gets upset by all three of them.
VIP entrance. If Bud Ford were here, this would be where’d he go.
One final note, the Fifa Fan Block Party definitely won the Illinois State Fair Manager Bud Ford Award for most creative and baseless exaggeration of crowd attendance. When I used to work the press office of the State Fair, we would have to release attendance figures for each day. Ford invented some astronomical number every morning, leaving us to release it to skeptical journalists with the explanation that it was derived from gate totals, ticket sales and tonnage of waste removed. The moment he ceased being manager the ISF suddenly stopped routinely breaking 100,000 a day.
Anyway, when the Old Man and I first got to the party today the emcees on stage were quoting like 10,000. The next time they did a crowd announcement it was 15,000 then 50,000. By the end of the night they were definitely throwing out the hundred thousand number a staggeringly preposterous number. But the continued inflation of the crowd was a source of regular hilarity to me the old guy.