A nation expects Parreira to deliver

GROUP A/SOUTH AFRICA v MEXICO:Home support is sure to lift South Africa, who will be one of the fittest sides in this summer's World Cup, writes KEITH DUGGANin Johannesburg

AT THREE o’clock yesterday, Steven Pienaar strolled out onto the pitch at Soccer Stadium wearing flip-flops and carrying his football boots in his hand. He offered a bashful wave to the shrieks of excitement coming from a group of young volunteers who abandoned their primary task of spit-shining the showpiece stadium before the tremulous beginning of Africa’s adventure starts here today.

The voices of the helpers echoed around the vast stadium, which is shaped like a huge clay bowl and contains a seating theme of fiery orange. The stadium is designed around the African kalabash, the traditional eating bowl, and after dark, it lights up to dominate the landscape.

It was still sunny when the hosts took the field but a bitingly cold breeze rolled through the stadium and kicked up small clouds of dust around the ground. At 3pm this afternoon Irish time, the eyes of the world will be on this ground and the panic was evident in the number of men who ran around aimlessly shouting orders into walkie-talkies.

It seemed like the most relaxed South Africans in the ground were those who will step out into the light this afternoon. At midday, Carlos Alberto Parreira walked quickly onto the pitch and initiated a three-quarters pace training game which might have held clues as to the starting line-up. Not that the Brazilian was in the frame of mind for playing what Jack Charlton used to call “silly buggers”.

“It will be the same line up as started against Denmark,” he said afterwards. “Expect that. Mexico know who is going to start. There will be a couple of tactical changes, but it will be the same team.”

Parreira’s main mission is to keep some semblance of sanity around a team whose players have been thrust into what must be the strangest experience of their young lives. Much about the World Cup is an exercise in wilful folly anyway . . . so much fuss and expense and speculation about a game whose beauty is principally derived from its simplicity.

Parreira has asserted himself as a fair but stern patriarch of the South African team. He raised his eyes in mock horror when asked about the visitation rights of family and friends throughout this tournament. “We are not in a prison, not in the military,” he protested, adding that days are scheduled for time with family. “This promotes happiness.”

But Parreira remains wedded to the disciplinarian philosophy. His decision to axe Benny McCarthy, South Africa’s all-time leading goalscorer, from his tournament squad was in direct conflict with public sentiment and the most vivid example of his what he expects from his team.

Discipline and fitness matter more to him than reputation and now that there is nothing left to do but wait for their opening match against Mexico, he wants only to keep his players mindful of the fact that when underneath the swirl of lights and national expectation and the euphoria of the opening ceremony, this day is still about a football match.

“I cannot put more pressure,” he smiled. “It would not be one bit wise. They know they have to deliver. I don’t need to add anything at all. I doubt there will be another team in better physical condition than our team. I just want them to enjoy it.”

Every coaching instinct of Parreira’s went against the rapturous parade in which his players participated in downtown Johannesburg on Wednesday afternoon. But even he had to concede that there was something special about the occasion.

“Suddenly there is this euphoria because the World Cup has come to the best side on the African continent,” he declared. “And we have to understand the feelings of the people. I was told by the players that they could feel the joy and hope of the people. You know, the opening game is always different. It is a lot of pressure and intimidating for both teams. As I said from the beginning, as much as the pressure is, I want our players to enjoy it as well. This team has a face now. This team has an identity.”

There has been notably little talk about the greater significance of this opening match. The decades of exile that distinguished South African football, when the apartheid regime led to a suspension from Fifa from 1961 until 1992, meant the game, primarily a mode for escape and expression among the black community, existed in an underground way. South Africa was literally a non-entity as a football country.

Rehabilitation began from within in the 1970s with the rise of the integrated semi-professional South Africa Soccer league. Teams like the Durban Aces, the Cape Ramblers and Moroko Swallows drew tens of thousands of supporters, whose attendance ran in direct conflict with the regime and was handsomely covered in the black popular press, until the league was shut down in 1966.

But today’s match in Johannesburg is about the players who braved those forgotten games as well as the aspirations, realistic or otherwise, of the Boys who will make a historic walk tomorrow.

Modern South African history seems rich with incandescent moments of optimistic symbolism and the roar which greets Aaron Mokoena when he leads his team on to the field will come not just from those lucky enough to be in Soccer Stadium, it will come also from those silent decades. The trick for the South African players is to somehow tap into that enormous charge of human electricity and use it to sweep them on to new territory.

“The belief is there,” said Mokoena solemnly. And he was not lying. It is pulsing throughout this city.