World Cup watchFIFA warns South Africa that stampede must not be repeated
Sepp Blatter, FIFA president, believes that the crowd stampede during last Sunday’s Nigeria-North Korea warm-up game, in which 16 people were trampled, came close to giving the World Cup finals a tragedy before they had started — but may serve as a wake-up call to South Africa’s security services to take security at the games more seriously
Police attempt to control crowd at soccer match on 7 June // Source: yahoo.com
FIFA has left South Africa’s police in no doubt that there can be no repeat of the events of Sunday night at the Makhulong Stadium in Tembisa, where thousands of fans desperate to see Nigeria play a warm-up match against North Korea surged through an open gate. Fans fell and were crushed by hundreds attempting to rush past them as police stood by helplessly (“South African World Cup preparations called into question after 15 injured in stampede,” 7 June 2010 HSNW).
The game was not the responsibility of FIFA but Blatter, the organization’s president, and his executives felt the impact of the incident in the remote township east of Johannesburg.
Times’s Kevin Eason writes that the message from a meeting of the FIFA executive committee Tuesday in Johannesburg’s upmarket business district of Sandton City was relentlessly upbeat, with huge praise for South Africa’s Local Organizing Committee, but Blatter said that Tembisa was, as he put it in broken English, an “alarm clock” and added: “This will not happen at any match in the World Cup, you can be assured.”
Jérôme Valcke, the FIFA general secretary, was in constant touch with the South African Police Service (SAPS) as the incident unfolded. That sixteen people were injured was a warning of what can happen if crowds are not controlled.
“Please be sure that the level of organization we have when we organize a game is definitely higher than we have seen here in Tembisa,” Valcke said. “The teams have a preparation period for the World Cup and it is their duty to organise the number of games they wish to have before the World Cup. It should not be organized by us. It is under the umbrella of FIFA, but we gave all the organizational and commercial rights back to all member associations. We are in permanent contact with the police and after this game we got a call. It is not needed to tell them that the police working around the World Cup stadiums will be better than we saw in this case.”
The Nigerian Football Federation attempted to deflect the blame toward FIFA yesterday, claiming that the Makhulong Stadium was the only venue available because FIFA had the rights to every other stadium.
“We had no choice,” Taiwo Ogunjobi, the technical committee chairman, said. “That was the only venue available to us. FIFA had taken control of all the stadia we could have used and we had to settle for this one because we needed to play this match.”
FIFA, however, controls only the ten stadiums nominated for World Cup games, while the Makhulong Stadium had a £3 million refit to be a training venue for North Korea. Police were disturbed by the sight of as many as 10,000 free tickets being given away outside the stadium, which appeared to trigger unrest as fans feared they might not get in even if they had a ticket.
Valcke pounced on that as a key contributing factor. “We are criticized for not distributing tickets on match day,” he said. “But this proved that we are right and you should never distribute tickets on a match day.”
Eason writes that Blatter and Valcke will hope that the shadow cast by the events in Tembisa will have cleared as the World Cup build-up gathers pace toward the opening match at Soccer City Stadium, just down the road from the Soweto township.
