My latest column is on South Africa:

There are still five days to go before the last ball is kicked at the World Cup, but the sense of relief in South Africa is already palpable. Over the past month, the country has put itself on trial by hosting the world’s biggest sporting event. South Africans were desperate to show to foreigners that their country was safe, welcoming and sophisticated. But they also wanted to prove a point to themselves: that their nation, which is still deeply divided on racial grounds, could unite around a successful tournament. FT column: South Africa’s trial by World Cup“>Read more

So much for the collapse of Europe and the unstoppable rise of the Latins. There were three Latin American-European clashes in the last quarters of the World Cup – and the Europeans won all of them. In my newspaper column last Tuesday, I argued that most efforts to impose some sort of theory about the rise and fall of nations on a mere football tournament were basically bullshit – and I feel vindicated by the collapse of the “collapse of Europe” theory.

I saw the two Joburg-based quarter finals live. Getting to matches in Johannesburg is a good deal less convenient than elsewhere. In Durban and Cape Town, the new stadiums are right on the beachfront and easy to walk to. Getting to Soccer City in Soweto involves complicated park-and-ride schemes. And Ellis Park, where Spain and Paraguay played last night, is in a ropey part of the centre of Johannesburg. I had met a couple of Chileans who complained of having to walk back from a game there, through darkened streets at past midnight. But I went to the match with Lungile Madywabe, a South African journalist, who was quite happy parking his (old) Mercedes in the neighbourhood. The surroundings of the stadium were pretty lively: short-time hotels, darkened night clubs with music blaring, some people gathered around briars and lots of stalls selling match memorabilia, including the dreaded vuvuzelas. Read more

Still brooding about England’s defeat, I went to Cape Town last night to watch Spain play Portugal. I find that at this stage in the competition, a sort of fellow feeling settles in amongst the followers of defeated nations. On the plane down, I sat next to some Chileans who were still licking their wounds, after their team’s 3-0 defeat by Brazil the previous night. They told me that England had been unlucky; I told them that Chile had been unlucky. Near the ground, a bunch of fans in Mexican shirts noticed my England scarf – and we jointly cursed the referees in this competition, and agreed that both our teams had been victims of incompetence or worse. Then queuing to get into the ground I got chatting to a Japanese fan, who had just seen his team go out on penalties to Paraguay. I told him how impressed I had been by Honda, the Japanese forward. “He’s called Honda, but he plays like a Ferrari,” replied the fan, who was over from Tokyo for the week. Read more

Sitting in the stands last night, waiting for the Argentina-Mexico game to start, I texted a South African friend about England’s loss to Germany earlier in the day. “We were robbed”, I wrote. Her reply reminded me that “In SA, that phrase is ambiguous”.

Actually, one of the things that most visitors to this World Cup agree about is that South Africa feels a lot less scary than they expected. I have been here four days now, and I haven’t been murdered once. Read more

The Afghan war effort is in chaos; the Australian prime minister has resigned and the G20 are meeting in Toronto. But the global event that I have decided to concentrate on is the World Cup. I have just arrived in Durban and later this afternoon, I will be attending the Lusophone derby: Brazil v Portugal.

One of the things I love about the World Cup is the way that it takes a country over. Even the air hostesses on my flight down from Johannesburg were wearing football kit (a marked improvement on the fussy uniforms that BA put their cabin crew in). Out on the Durban waterfront almost everybody is wearing either a Brazil or a Portugal shirt.  The miles of golden sand are playing host to lots of Copacabana-style games of beach football (the Durban beaches knock spots off the Copacabana). Everybody is in a good mood. At one stage, a street hawker began to shout at me rather loudly, in what I ïnitially took to be an aggressive manner. But then I made out his words: “My brother, your flies are undone.” I bought a Brazil cap off him, as a reward for his tip. Read more

Just after England’s abject 0-0 draw with Algeria in Friday night, my friend Stephen turned to me and said – “The whole world is laughing at us.” That’s the thing about the World Cup. I invariably fall into the trap of seeing the England team as representing me personally – and so their rare triumphs and frequent disasters can never be shrugged off. Searching desperately for consolation, as England head for the exits, I can only note that we are not the only big European country to be struggling: France are all but eliminated; Germany lost to Serbia; Spain, inexplicably, lost to Switzerland.

But, let us not dwell solely on the negative. Here are my World Cup highlights for the first week:

1) Best game: USA 2- Slovenia 2: A fanatstic comeback by the Americans from 2-0 down. This US team has a college-boy charm; they work hard and they are good sports. They barely protested when they were inexplicably denied a perfectly legitimate winning goal that would have made this one of the all-time great comebacks. The second best game was Denmark 2- Cameroon 1, last night. Fantastic attacking football – I was just a bit sad that Cameroon didn’t get the result they deserved. Read more

Warning: this “foreign affairs” blog may contain quite a lot about football over the next month. With the World Cup underway, I’m finding it hard to concentrate on my usual diet of failed states, UN resolutions and brave struggles for democracy. The 42-inch-plasma TV is now installed and looking vulgar and out of place in my otherwise tasteful, sitting room. It arrived just in time for me to watch Argentina-Nigeria – a game that Alan Beattie has called the “bad governance derby”. Argentina won 1-0, as sovereign defaulters triumphed over sufferers from the oil curse.

Then in the evening – England’s 1-1 draw with the USA, featuring the latest in a long line of horrendous, suicidal errors by England goalies. I remember when I was growing up, it was taken as a read that England produced the best goalkeepers in the world – just like we had the best police. I still have some faith in the police – but the goalies?? Read more