World Cup Countdown: Waiting game

In 1995 South Africa won rugby's World Cup on home soil in their first appearance in the competition. It was pure soap opera, the massive Ellis Park Stadium rising as one to yell its heart out as the then president-cum-deity, Nelson Mandela, beamed in his number six Springbok jersey alongside a tearful and pious captain.

South Africans of all races grinned at one another or broke through their ghastly reserve to mumble something about the game in supermarket queues. In 80 minutes, it seemed, the pain and solitude of 350 years had been redeemed, however temporarily.

Seven years later, the reality has become a little clearer. Racial unity in the country is as tenuous as ever, with many whites fearing that the race-psychosis of Zimbabwe will spread south while many blacks watch with dread the re-emergence of a heavily armed Christian fundamentalist right wing.

Not even that happy day in 1995 has escaped the steady disillusionment: former winger Chester Williams had the country's rugby aristocracy reaching for their riding crops and choking on their rum and cokes with allegations in his recently published memoirs of racial discord in the most famous team of the Rainbow Nation.

The last bubble burst in October when sports minister Ngconde Balfour, a jovial fellow who has wooed white hearts and minds with some success by shoe-horning himself into cricket togs and speaking awful Afrikaans, insisted that black fans wanted to see black cricketers, not white.

It was a credit to the republic's watchdog bodies that his comments were examined by a tribunal to establish if they constituted hate-speech, but yet another blow to the myth of unity in a country obsessed with not being racist and therefore doomed to focus constantly on race.

It takes only the briefest association with South African sport to realise that nobody says what they think: ask for a straight answer, and you would be forgiven for assuming you had asked the CIA for a holiday snaps album of its outing to the Bay of Pigs. Those who do speak their mind are expertly discredited by being labelled as 'lovable eccentrics' before being rapidly shunted 'sideways' until former Test greats are coaching under-13 development teams on wind-blasted dustbowls.

The ensuing silence is filled with marketing noise, an apparently inexhaustible outpouring of mediocrity and mental turgidity masquerading as wit and excitement, and more frustratingly, as public opinion. The country's small pool of competent cricket writers dare not fall out of favour with the apparatchiks on whom their jobs depend, resulting in the journalistic equivalent of fast food: it goes down easily, it is all absolutely identical, and as satisfying as damp cardboard.

The World Cup 2003 press machine has been remarkably lethargic thus far: with the quality and quantity of media coverage the event has been getting in South Africa, you would think we were hosting the AGM of the Retired Army Wives Backgammon Association.

But even through this smattering of miserable marketing one predictable thrust is loud and clear: the whole of South Africa is looking forward to the showcase event; a chance to introduce the game to new audiences; come together under the banner of good sportsmanship; Rainbow Renaissance Etceteras, and a host of similar clangers.

But what do South Africans think of the coming event? More pertinently, what do the vast majority, the working-class black and coloured people so blithely rounded up and corralled as frenziedly excited fans by the marketing suits, think about the World Cup?

Beyond the leafy suburbs of Cape Town lies the urban sprawl of the new South Africa, the one that keeps cricket's marketing men awake at night. Millions live in the giant shanty towns that have mushroomed over the last 20 years, while the majority of Cape Town's original inhabitants, the coloured community, live in sand-blasted suburbs created for them by the apartheid regime after they were forcibly removed from more picturesque parts. This city in itself, the Cape Flats, is where I went to look for the World Cup.

Summer is making a hesitant return to the Western Cape, and although many dirt streets are still badly scored by flooding, the cricket matches have begun in earnest. Drive past seven streets and you will find six matches in progress, each with its accompanying contingent of dogs, toddlers banished to deep fine leg after getting in the way, and fruit-box wickets. These are private affairs, and two games came to a halt when I approached, but a third tolerated my presence. Who, I asked the deep cover fielder next to my car, was going to win the World Cup?

Faisal is 10, with a scar on his chin and greenish eyes that have earned him the nickname 'Groene', Afrikaans for Greeny. Between deliveries and the odd tumbling of wickets he explains why Australia will beat South Africa in the Final, citing similar pitch conditions in the two countries, the psychological edge Australia hold over the hosts, and the predominance of left-handers in their top six which will make life difficult for bowlers accustomed to right-handers.

His grasp of the game is astonishing, and he is a more than handy fielder as a gorgeous extra-cover drive thumps against my window, is plucked off on the rebound and sends the fruit-box cartwheeling end over end from 30 yards out. At last I am invited to join in, and the fielding captain, known simply as Dammit ('not Dermott, that's a whole other name, it's Dammit') asks me what I bowl. Left-arm medium is the answer, sometimes a little bit of in-swing depending on the prevailing gale. In the grand tradition of glovemen the wicket-keeper advises the batsman in astonishingly foul language that he is about to get a tennis ball up his nostril, that they are all about to witness unprecedented pace. The slips flatteringly back-pedal into the distance.

'You shave a tennis ball and leave it in the sun for three days,' my new captain reveals as a dog disgraces itself on the wickets despite a stream of abuse from the 'keeper. 'It either cracks and loses its bounce, or you get this.' 'This' turns out to be a slightly shrunken ball the colour of the dirt road and possessed of vicious bounce.

Determined to dish up a half-volley to the obliging batsman, the pressure of the moment is too much and I drag the ball down short, making it rear savagely straight into the child's head. Short of revealing myself to be Jennifer Lopez's fiancé, I could have done nothing to be accepted more quickly and with as much admiration.

The boys are interested to see what happens in the World Cup but nearly all are pessimistic about South Africa's chances and, besides, only 'rich folks' can go to games or afford Mnet, the subscription television channel that has secured the rights to all South Africa's away series for most of their lives. I tell them that the tournament will be on the national broadcaster, and they hardly seem more enthusiastic.

A fearfully thin boy with a missing tooth bowls me with a leg-break that turns easily four feet, and I move on to the older generation, in their scrubby front gardens or leaning over doors shooting the breeze.

Darryl, a father of three, doesn't know and doesn't care what South Africa's World Cup squad should look like, because there's no way the monkeys who run the whole corrupt business will give deserving players a chance. All this noise about quotas is bull, he insists, just another way blacks get to squeeze out coloureds. Where is Paul Adams? Where is Faiek Davids? Where is Roger Telemachus? And give them half an excuse and they'll drop Ashwell Prince.

I'd do better to talk to his wife, who at least still follows the game. Cynthia is very shy and modest, giving Darryl frightful glares for having got her into this situation, but she soon warms to her subject, expressing major doubts about the leadership skills of Shaun Pollock.

'Hansie Cronje was such a wonderful man,' she says. 'Oh, we miss him.' She means the team, and her family. Half a mention of Cronje's fall from grace brings a quick correction. 'He asked for forgiveness before God, and who are we to speak ill of the dead?' Often she calls him a mooi man, translatable either as handsome or good, and she means both.

In other streets there are shrugs - we don't have Mnet, Australia are too good - but the overwhelming sense is that people have better things to worry about: the daily business of living in ganglands and trying to deal with rising prices. Half an hour away, in one of the city's busiest bus terminals, my questions get an entirely different kind of response.

These are Xhosa-speakers, black Capetonians, some of whom have lived in the shanty towns and slums on the Cape Flats since the mid-1960s. Most of the people going home from work are unwilling to talk to me, but those who do are interested that a World Cup is coming to South Africa: it's the first they have heard of it. Nearly all joke that it's not the World Cup, the soccer tournament to end all soccer tournaments.

Who is playing who? Gift tells me that if there is anything I need to know about Australia, he's the fellow: he once saw Kim Hughes' rebels at Newlands when he had a job with the hotel nearby. He laughs when I ask him if he will be supporting Australia. 'South Africa, baby, all the way!' Suddenly unsure, he double-checks that South Africa will be playing. Reassured, he gives two thumbs up. 'South Africa. Or West Indies. Brian Lara, Ambrose.'

Everybody else tells me they are pulling for South Africa, for Makhaya Ntini - the only name many of them know - and for Allan Donald. Grace names Cronje in her three-man squad, alongside Ntini and Lance Klusener, and is shocked when she is told of Cronje's death. She covers her mouth with her hands, eyes wide, and then laughs. Dead? And Ntini, is he okay?

In one respect the advertisers are right. South Africans are behind South Africa. But that was as far as it went with the people I spoke to. Cricket, tiddlywinks, it really didn't matter. Through dozens and dozens of polite smiles and the mantra 'No, I don't know', a picture emerged of a tournament happening despite, not because of, the loyalties and passions of its hosts.

Surveys have suggested that in terms of popularity South Africa's national sports are football, boxing and horseracing, with cricket and rugby bringing up the rear, which is not to say that the people I spoke to were hostile towards the sport or the event.

Just don't ask them to surrender seven hours of their Saturday afternoon to watch...who again?