Category: sports

Tweetography: FIFA, can we blow our horns?

Guest post by Graham Hough-Cornwell

The World Cup is all of six days old and already the controversy rages. Not over the best team, the most skillful player, the biggest disappointment, or the prettiest goal, but over the vuvuzela, a thin plastic horn popular at South African soccer matches and blaring by the thousands at every World Cup game so far.

The French national team, following a disappointing scoreless tie against Uruguay, blamed the instrument for their poor play. After a lackluster showing in a narrow 1-0 win over Nigeria, Argentinian star and 2010 World Player of the Year Lionel Messi claimed, “It is impossible to communicate, it’s like being deaf.”

Twitter provides the main outlet for people around the world to express their hatred (or, less often, their love) for the vuvuzela. A simple search on Twitter for “#vuvuzela” reveals thousands of tweets posted daily around the globe. Most tweets are humorous:

JonahFisher: Girl in front of me is blowing #vuvuzela and has earplugs in. Strikes me as rather unfair. #wc2010

lee_Kern: The kazoo has more grace than the Vuvuzela, and the kazoo is a f***ing stupid instrument… http://youtu.be/gjQ0MzWH4Ss #vuvuzela

The complaints came as no surprise. Following public outcry over the vuvuzela during last summer’s World Cup warmup tournament in South Africa FIFA (soccer’s world governing body) President Sepp Blatter decided not to ban the horn because he did not want to “Europeanize the first African World Cup.”

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The World Cup’s bittersweet draught

Nelson Mandela worked hard to bring the World Cup to South Africa. But he didn’t attend the opening game, as was highly anticipated. Instead, he stayed at home mourning the death of his granddaughter, Zenani, who was killed by a car allegedly driven by a drunken driver on the eve of the opening game.


Jets fly over the opening ceremony of the 2010 FIFA World Cup at Soccer City in Johannesburg. It was a happy occasion, to be sure, but not for one South African icon. Creative commons licensed photo by Flickr user Shine 2010 – 2010 World Cup good news.

Heavy drinking and certain sports seem inextricably linked around the world. In my home town of Washington, D.C., the local government agreed to let bars open at 7 a.m. for early games, though you can’t get a drink until 8 a.m. weekdays and Saturdays, and 10 a.m. Sundays. Curious, I asked the college-age assistants in my office: “Is it essential to drink while watching the World Cup?” The chorus of replies was, “Yes, essential.”

As the World Cup games proceed, bars around the world, not just South Africa’s bars and shebeens, will be far busier than usual. And there will be far more drunk drivers on the roads. Sports rivalry and risk-taking seem to go hand in hand: risky games, risky drinking, risky driving, risky sex and who knows what else.

The thrill of it all. For many. But not for everyone.