South Africa 2010: A World Cup of Surprises

South Africa 2010 could so far be summed up as a World Cup full of surprises.

Previous World cup exploits by Cameroon (1990) and Senegal (2002) had led soccer pundits to predict that Africa was the rising force of World soccer. Ghana and Nigeria’s dominance of the World’s junior soccer tournaments illustrated the continent’s potential with the prediction seemingly justified by stars like Drogba, Essien and Eto’ consistently mentioned amongst the World’s top ten players.

The World has started to appreciate Africa’s natural talent with a multitude of European based stars playing for the largest clubs on the globe. With so many recognizable stars, the cooperation of weather and match officials as well as vocal support accorded to host nations, you could almost hear Africa say in unison, “This is it!” One of the African teams would at last break into the semi-finals.

Going into the last round of group games, Cameroon had already won the infamous title of the first team to be eliminated and it looked to be the familiar tale of “if only(s)” for African teams yet again!

Fancied Ivory Coast were again unlucky to be drawn in the group of death and looked all but eliminated after North Korea’s 7:0 thumping by Portugal. The draw against their qualification rivals in the opening match they had dominated for long spells suddenly looked like a disastrous result.

Host nation South Africa’s chances of advancing from the group stages were very remote given its ranking as 83rd in World soccer. Given the comedy in the French camp, South Africa approached their last game with genuine hope. They simply needed to somehow find the finishing needed to accumulate a handful of goals as long as Mexico and Uruguay did not connive to draw their last game.

Algeria also given nearly no chance of advancing from its group when the draw was made had fallen to a very unlucky last minute goal against Slovenia but won a morale boosting 0:0 draw against the fancied English. They simply needed to win against a very determined United States team, a tall order given that Algeria had not scored a goal in the tournament.

Ghana the youngest side in tournament were the first and eventually only African side to win a game from the first two group games. To guarantee qualification, they needed a draw against a German side needing a win to survive and boasting an enviable record of having never failed to advance from the World Cup group stages.

Africa risked not having a qualifier from the group stages and South Africa would make history as the first host nation to fail to advance to the World cup knock out stage. The positive surprise at that point was that Africa had proved to be a successful host of the World’s most popular sporting event.

At the end of the group stage, defending Champions Italy had been eliminated while pre-tournament favorites Spain and England barely scraped through their groups.

Ghana is Africa’s sole representative in the next round while South Korea and Japan may make the soccer pundits switch their allegiance to Asia as the rising force of World soccer.

“Clueless” Maradona has Argentina flying high as the tournament’s most successful team so far!

For a tournament that has so far seen surprises aplenty and the tag of favorites hold no water during match ups, stay tuned for a few first times and surprising teams to grace the treasured last eight.