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South Africa Ready for World Cup

©Rex

Judging by these pictures of Johannesburg's Soccer City football stadium, South Africa looks more than ready to host this year's World Cup.

All around and inside the impressive stadium, workers are putting finishing cosmetic touches to parts of the construction and also to the approach roads and transport hubs, while vendors of vuvuzelas (the traditional, elongated South African horns blown by so many football fans in the country, as well as in South America) sell their wares, each one customised for each country participating in the 2010 World Cup.

Soccer City, the new jewel in Johannesburg's otherwise battered crown, is aptly located on the site of an old gold mine, the historic source of the city's wealth.

The South African Football Association has its headquarters next door to Soccer City, previously known as the FNB Stadium, which is the largest on the entire African continent, with a capacity of 94,700, and the site of Nelson Mandela's first speech in Johannesburg after his release from Robben Island.

Its major facelift for the tournament was designed with inspiration drawn from traditional African pottery, as can be seen by the red and clay brown mosaic 'calabash' effect on the exterior - at night, a ring of lights running round the bottom of the outside of the stadium light up to simulate a fire heating up this giant football 'pot'.

Inside the stadium, architectural genius is hard at work: there are no restricted views from any of the 94,700 seats and none are more than 100m from the pitch.

©Rex

The stands are painted with ten black vertical lines; nine are aligned geographically with the other stadia involved in the tournament and a tenth line is aimed at Berlin's Olympic Stadium, which hosted the previous World Cup final in 2006.

This represents the road to the final and it is hoped that after the World Cup, each goal scored at the stadium will be placed in pre-cast concrete panels on a podium so that the full history of the tournament's scores can be seen for years to come.

Although the city's notorious reputation of violence as the 'murder capital of the world' has raised grave concerns among the local tourist trade as to how many international fans will visit Johannesburg, no one could accuse the city of not pulling out all the stops to make the stadium worthy of World Cup matches.

Organisers are instead choosing not to bring too much attention to the high wire fences and the logos on walls for armed response security firms, instead assuring visitors that security at the stadium itself will be watertight.