All-Purpose, Never-Ending Soccer Thread

Again, not wishing others to fail, but it's just a fact: South Africa has some major hurdles to overcome and the US would be first in line to pick up the Cup.

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CAPE TOWN, South Africa (Reuters) -- Building stadiums for the 2010 soccer World Cup could create 107,000 jobs in South Africa but procurement issues and a shortage of raw materials may delay construction, a treasury official said on Wednesday.

Malcolm Simpson, deputy director general at the Treasury's World Cup unit, said a shortage of skills, a lack of materials and rising costs posed problems for construction schedules.

"The risks of this project are high," Simpson told parliament's portfolio committee on finance.

"Raw material supply side constraints (are) high... On the procurement we considered this (risk) high as there was possible litigation due to poor tender evaluation techniques and preparation of tender documents."

The government hopes the World Cup will stimulate growth in Africa's biggest economy by attracting hundreds of thousands of soccer fans and tourists. Questions have been raised over its ability to finish the huge project on time.

Simpson said a task team had been set up to help the nine host cities with procurement challenges, given an estimated 80 to 100 million rand would be "burned" by municipalities each month at the height of construction.

"This is significant work and it is believed that construction contractors will have to have two teams working 24 hours a day on these sites to ensure that the stadiums are constructed on time," Simpson said.

The government has pledged to pump a total of 17.4 billion rand ($2.34 billion) into preparations for the World Cup.

The bill is estimated at 8.4 billion rand for stadium construction and refurbishment and another 9 billion rand to upgrade a crumbling transportation system.

Aside from construction worries, South Africa also faces the daunting task of convincing the world it is tackling one of the highest crime rates in the world before 2010.

 

I really have my doubts about South Africa delivering on this. But FIFA will need to make a decision soon as to what they're going to do. Certainly if FIFA are going to stick with the alternate continent with Europe then the US is the only place they could go to with the facilities ready and waiting. If they don't want to go back to the US so soon then I can only hope they go with England as a back up for purely selfish reasons. I can't see three consecutive tournaments being held in Europe though.

 

Man United v. Lille live on the computer today for free -- http://broadband.espn.go.com/espn360/

 

Well, that will at least provide for some viewing today.
Thank you, sir!

 

Good gosh, Lille's biggest player is the same size as ManU's smallest player.

 

No Giggs to start for United. Quite the dropoff when O'Shea comes in for him.

 

So much for getting some work done this afternoon. Can IT people notice when you're computer is sucking up a lot of bandwidth?

 

I love when actors like Ronaldo get carded for diving (even though he probably didn't deserve that one)

 

I no longer have the Man U game as I was able to locate a back-door channel to watch the Celtic/AC Milan game. Sure, the announcing is in Italian, but at least I have the game.

 

Watching these matches, I'm reminded of how good an announcer Adrian Healey is.

(This is Healey teamed with Tommy Smyth, right?)

 

Derek Rae.

 

Kaka puts the ball in the back of the old onion bag giving Milan the lead less than 3' into overtime. Wow.