Vuvuzelas Banned From Springbok Rugby Game Verus All Blacks at Soccer City
Vuvuzelas, the plastic horns heard droning through every World Cup soccer match, will be banned when South Africa’s world champion Springboks rugby team meets New Zealand’s All Blacks at Soccer City in Soweto next month.
The Aug. 21 match will be moved to the almost 90,000-seat stadium after the Golden Lions Rugby Union, which has the right to host international rugby in Johannesburg, agreed to move from its home venue, the 62,000 seat Ellis Park. Soccer City hosts the FIFA World Cup final on July 11.
“We’d rather not have vuvuzelas” because they will drown out calls by players at line-outs and scrums, Golden Lions President Kevin de Klerk told reporters in Johannesburg today. The match could draw the largest crowd for a home Springboks Test match since 1955, when about 95,000 spectators watched the team play the British and Irish Lions at Ellis Park.
Vuvuzelas have become one South Africa’s fastest-selling sports items with manufacturers struggling to keep up. Four weeks after the World Cup started the term, which is said to mean “to make a loud noise” in Zulu, returns more than 20 million results when typed into Google Inc’s search engine while Facebook Inc’s “I hate the vuvuzela sound” group has more than 1,609 followers. Some malls in South Africa have banned the blowing of vuvuzelas after customer complaints.
South Africa spent about $4.6 billion building and renovating 10 stadiums for the soccer World Cup, raising concern that the country won’t be able to afford the cost of maintaining the venues after the tournament ends. Maintaining the stadiums is likely to cost between 350 million rand ($46 million) and 500 million rand a year, according to Udesh Pillay, co-author of “Development and Dreams: The Urban Legacy of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.”
Cut-Price Tickets
Ticket prices for the Springboks-All Blacks Test will be reduced, the South African Rugby Union said in a statement. More than 9,000 tickets will be sold at 350 rand each and a further 5,000 for 100 rand each, exclusively in Soweto, the lowest prices for a Springboks Test since 2005, it said.
The South Africa-New Zealand clash forms part of the Tri-Nations, the southern hemisphere’s annual rugby championship. The Springboks are the current champions having beaten the All Blacks in all three games en route to the 2009 title. The two teams have clashed 78 times in the past 89 years with New Zealand leading with 42 wins compared with South Africa’s 33 and a further three drawn.
To contact the reporter on this story: Garth Theunissen in Johannesburg gtheunissen@bloomberg.net
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