Six months after the football World Cup kicked off in Johannesburg, South Africans are coming to terms with the fact that hosting the premier international sporting event boosted national pride but attracted a third fewer visitors than expected.
South African pace bowler Dale Steyn is quite positive about winning the forthcoming World Cup to be played early next year. Steyn assured that the team would not be getting on the field for any match during the event with even the least memories of last World Cup where they had many embarrassing moments.
The World Cup brought in welcome foreign currency, but football tourists spent about a tenth of the government’s multi-billion euro tab and the global recession has dulled the return on investment.
The money spent by the 310,000 visitors pales next to the government’s 3.6-billion-euro outlay on the extravaganza.
In 1996 ICC World Cup too the story almost repeated but much earlier and in the hands of West Indies when a superb century by Brian Lara enabled his team to defeat South Africa in quarter final.
In 1999 semi final game, South Africa struggled superbly to tie with Australia in semi finals but due to a lower run rate in Super Six matches compared to Australia, they had to stay back to let Australia reach to finals.
In 2003 it was much worse scenario when South Africa misjudged scoring based on Duckworth Lewis Rules and that wrong calculation threw them out of the fray much earlier.
Steyn remarked about all these previous mistakes done by his team by stating that probably the team had a stream of bad luck during all those previous World Cup events and hoped that with 7 players from his team appearing for the first time in World Cup 2011, the team would try to reverse all bad luck to grab the honor this time.
He assured that each of the team member would be delivering their best to achieve this target being dreamed by each teammate.
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