CAPE TOWN LETTER: SO CAPE TOWN prepares to take down the tents and put away the bunting after the World Cup departs the Mother City this evening. Politics are politics but it is a great pity this weekend's final is being played in Johannesburg and not here.
Johannesburg is changing and improving and becoming safer but nowhere in its vast, brooding sprawl does it have even a hint of the open-faced beauty Cape Town possesses.
With one or two exceptions, I think a great city needs to be built on a great body of water, at best an ocean, at worst a mighty impressive river. Cape Town has two oceans at the foot of its natural amphitheatre and Table Mountain surveying everything from behind the city.
The first glimpse as you drive in the high road from the airport tells you you will like this place immensely.
On Saturday the town belonged to the Argentines and the Germans. Well during daylight it did. By the time darkness was with us it belonged to the Germans.
They may be an orderly and systematic people but they sure know how to riff on a vuvuzuela, masterfully squeezing that one note out of their plastic instruments as they get a drink and a sandwich.
And then by the next day everybody seemed to have gone. The Argentines, one presumes, vanished in a puff of Diego’s cigar smoke. The Germans moved on to Durban for the showdown with Spain.
By yesterday the town was kitted out for the new arrivals. The Uruguayans are coming. All two dozen of them! It's an odd thing about World Cups, they remind you how ignorant you are of the world (Shocking confession. Having read a lifetime's worth of books about South Africa I have always, until this trip, somewhere in my head had Johannesburg down as the sunny, happy city and Cape Town as sinister and brooding. I can blame this only on the songs that come into my mind every time I think about either place. Eddy Grant's Give Me Hope Jo'annawas like a summer breeze; Randy Newman's sublimely chilling Christmas in Cape Townwith it's bitter Afrikaneer narrator always frightened the crap out of me.)
I mean what do we know about Uruguay? Until the weekend I knew the old Groucho Marx joke “You go Uruguay, I’ll go mine”. . . And nothing else apart from the fact that they have won a couple of World Cups.
Now travelling around here I have been reading Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper (whose Football Against the Enemywas a groundbreaking read) and Stefan Szymanski, who is an economist but probably still a nice guy. The premise is basically to do for soccer what the Michael Lewis book Moneyballdid for baseball, ie create a new way of studying and understanding the game through statistical prisms.
Disappointingly, I find myself refusing to make most of the leaps the guys make and the book irritates me far more than it impresses me. There is a long, seemingly convincing argument about the correlation of population size with soccer success.
To which one just wants to say one word: Uruguay.
How can a nation of 3.3 million (only six smaller nations have ever even made it to the finals) have two World Cups and 14 Copa Libertadores and two Olympic golds? It makes no sense.
Uruguay will go into tonight’s match as underdogs and villains, having stolen Ghana’s glory in the quarter-final. I don’t care. I’m with them.
Any place whose name translates as lyrically as Uruguay’s has my support. The name means River of the Painted Birds. Any nation that chooses, out of respect, to play in the sky blue of the Dubs, again they have my respect and support.
And any team playing as unlikely a pair up front as Diego Forlan and Sebastian Abreu.
Forlan is one of those players whose failure in England seems more like an indictment of the game there than of the player.
He works with such heart and intelligence surely a team could have been built around him? Instead, he scored 10 goals in three years at Old Trafford before heading off to Spain where he has scored 120 goals in six seasons.
And Abreu? What sort of a man chips the goalie with the last penalty of a World Cup penalty shoot-out? That image of him walking back, tattooed arms spread and grin illuminating the stadium. Well that’s what you pay money to see.
There aren’t enough Uruguayans around to make a dent in Cape Town’s colour scheme and the neutrals won’t go for them after the Hand of God incident.
They never had a chance anyway. Cape Town is being reclaimed by the Dutch.
They first took it back in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck set up a port of call for the Dutch East India Company (Does it ever strike you Irish history started to go wrong with our failure to establish our own Irish East India Company? Everybody else seems to have had an East India Company.)
They stayed, lost the Cape, got it back, sold it to the English and in 1836 went off, 10,000 or so families of them, on that mythical Afrikaneer adventure, the Groot Trek, or Great Trek, just a huge caravan of these people heading off into the northern interior of the country to begin new lives.
It’s funny but ever since then Dutch fans seem incapable of moving anywhere in units of less than 10,000 at a time.
What a twist of fate it has been for South Africa. When they first started day-dreaming of hosting this competition they can scarcely have thought the local populace, the majority grouping in the country, would be faced with choosing between a little known South American country who beat Bafana Bafana 3-0 and then killed off Ghana,or the Orange of the home place of the old Afrikaaners. Most of the people you spoke to in Cape Town yesterday were firm in their choice. Germany.
