According to reports I have heard from pundits at the games the sound isn’t nearly as annoying inside the ground. The poor sound quality we get at home makes them sound tinny, giving the impression of a thousand bees trapped in a tin can but, apparently, within the stadium it sounds great and adds to the atmosphere. Pundits in the stadium say they can also hear the supporters singing their songs over the noise of the vuvus but at home all you can hear is the incessant drone.
I would take with a pinch of salt the reports from players that say they can’t concentrate as from what I have seen they are always from players who have just had a bad game, I haven’t seen any winning side complain.
It would be hard for FIFA to ban them on the basis that they are annoying and would set a sticky precedent for future complaints about all manner of practices at football matches but I would think they could stand firm on H&S issues. From what I have heard the volume of the vuvus is potentially damaging to the ear drum which would give FIFA an nice easy way to ban them and save face but they are still too spineless to take it.
As said before, the most important thing should be what players are saying and unfortunately for the people who enjoy blowing their horns for 90 minutes straight, many of them have complained. They - from the top of my head: Messi, Ronaldo, some french players - claim it is impossible to communicate with their teammates, let alone the coach. Since communication is a key part of the game, this poses a problem.
Also, saying this tradition is more important then viewers at home - or in other words commerce - is as hypocritical as anything I’ve ever heard. For some time now it has been clear that FIFA is mainly in it for the money. last monday they threw 36 girls out of the Holland - Denmark match because they were wearing orange dresses that were made by a beer company (Bavaria) that is not the main sponsor of th tournament (Budweiser). They might’ve had a point if these dresses were branded, but this was not thes case; there was no way of knowing where they came from if you didn’t know already, no where on the dress did it say Bavaria.
Another example is how they have forbidden any of the local street vendors to come even near the stadiums. Whoever is making the money on this world cup, it won’t be the locals that normally make their money through football.
Nah, this sounds like classic footballer arse-covering after some pretty mediocre displays from players who should know better.
Fact is that both France and Portugal - teams stuffed full of superstar players - were woeful in their opening games, and Argentina also failed to impress.
The whole French team is basically having one giant gallic strop at the moment, and this is just another thing for them to whinge about. And Ronaldo didn’t look like an £80m player against Ivory Coast.
And most tellingly… Germany didn’t seem to have any problem communicating when they took apart Australia, so the noise can’t be *that *distracting.
Even if the vuvuzela could be traced to some previous tradition, only some tribes used them lots of others did not. No one in South Africa is pushing the ancient tradition angle, the vuvuzela is a new tradition to go with the new South Africa.
And while FIFA have an iron grip on everything to do with the world cup, and are obviously all about profit, the vuvuzela has become important to them for some reason. When the Local Organising Committee said that they may ban vuvuzelas their FIFA bosses immediately stepped in and said that such a ban cannot happen.
I can call myself the Queen of Nantucket, but it doesn’t mean I really am.
Football rattles were traditional in English football for a lot longer than the vuvuzela’s existed. They were banned, so there’s no reason another annoying toy can’t be.
Being used in football stadiums since the 90s makes them a craze, not a tradition. Initially the point about apartheid keeping black people away from stadiums seemed a good one, until I started wondering if that meant that black South Africans were actually kept from playing football at all, even together in parks or less official places, which seems extremely unlikely. There was plenty of time for real traditions to develop.
Still, whatever; they’re not going to ban them, so everyone’ll just have to suffer through the horrible, horrible, noise and not be able to hear any other audience sounds, or turn the sound off and watch in silence even though that’s really odd. It’ll be a pretty crappy world cup, but better that than ban a plastic toy, apparently.
There is always hope that some audience members will listen to reason (if they have any hearing left) and not blow them through the entire game, which is the problem.
Quick point about sport in apartheid, non whites could not represent SA in international matches but they could play in local leagues as long as they kept the races separate. But because local football was most popular among the black population it could never get the same support from government that rugby and cricket got. Here is a page with a brief history of football in SA. So there was football in South Africa while we were excluded from world football and traditions did develop during that period, the makarapa helmet for example, but they were seen as predominantly black traditions. the vuvuzela, right at this moment, is being embraced as a South African thing, something that can be enjoyed without racist baggage. A point I have made in the various threads on this subject but which some people are just not getting.
South Africa went from the brink of a race and tribe based civil war to being able to host the biggest sporting event in the world in only twenty years. We are a young and fragile country, with a history of division and conflict that continues to hamper progress towards true unity and equality. And while I considered the idea that a sporting event could be good for the countries social development to be hopelessly naive before the world cup started. Now that it has started I can see just how powerful an agent of change something as simple as football can be when the majority of people embrace it, and the vuvuzela has become a symbol for that embrace. The vuvuzela is not a tradition, but it is well on its way to becoming one and those of you who would stifle this symbol of a unified South Africa are welcome to switch off your televisions and never think about South Africa again.
One might suggest that for a “young and fragile” nation it doesn’t bode well if the main thing keeping you from a descent into intra-tribal warfare is a plastic trumpet.
No, because it was a gradual ban at clubs, not a FIFA ban (as far as I recall from it happening in the early eighties).
Both.
That was a great post, and I appreciate your passion, but it’s a damn shame that you guys chose a toy which is so bloody annoying. Do you think the world cup would have brought people together less if they weren’t blowing on vuvuzelas? Isn’t it the football and the tournament which is bringing people together, not the toy?
FWIW, I strongly dislike the accusation that people who dislike the vuvuzela want to stifle South Africa or would be happy to never think of South Africa again. It is not racist to dislike a really blooming annoying buzzing.
Well put, Yendis. I think it’s hard for people to understand just how critical this world cup is for South Africa and Africa as a whole. For you, it may be a game on television. But for so many it’s a lot of hope and triumph, and somehow the vuvuzela has gotten mixed up in that all.
They didn’t choose the toy. It just happened to become popular. Well, I suppose it’s possible that the South African Ministry of Plastic Crap voted and the vuvuzela beat out the beer helmet, but it’s probably just one of those things.
You know, like how the Ford Escort was the best-selling car in Britain for 20 years even though it was a complete piece of shit.
ETA: yendis, any chance I can get you to send me a vuvuzela?
Personally I would have preferred it if singing traditional football songs in local languages had become the signature for local fans rather than just the vuvuzela. Mainly because the difference between say English fans singing and SA fans singing is like that between Anglicans singing in church and a gospel choir. I mean this is a country were politicians dance at rallies, we even sing and dance while on strike.
If I can work out how to ship the thing, I’ll gladly send you a vuvuzela Really Not All That Bright.
A last point. The reason why my post in thread is so passionate is mainly because the attitudes of some posters in the Pit thread on vuvuzelas got me really angry and frustrated which spilled over into my reply in this thread because my replies in the other thread didn’t seem to make a lot of difference.
Actually, if I were concerned about the threat of a national descent into inter-tribal warfare, I think I’d want the countervailing symbol of unity to be something cheap, popular, and readily available. Worrying about the innate gravitas or significance of the symbol would probably be pretty low down on my list of priorities.
“The Vuvuzela: Because Peace Is More Important than Peace and Quiet.” BRRRRRRRRRPPPPP!!
Only a gospel choir doesn’t sing through an entire church service, without interruption.
I appreciate that each country, and for that matter many regions and cities, have their own unique traditions of celebration at sporting events. Personally, I don’t have a problem with the vuvuzela itself; if I was at a World Cup game in South Africa, I’d probably be blowing one myself – when the team I’m cheering for scores. The issue many seem to have with it is that the drone is constant; it’s not tied to any action on the field, unlike the songs, cheers and noisemakers found in other cultures. With soccer/football games in South Africa, it seems like the game is secondary to the noisemaking.
Also, fark the pretentious snobs who try to attach more meaning to the vuvuzela than it actually has. IMHO, it’s just a friggin’ a noisemaker used by South African soccer fans, not the “cry of a continent”, “the song of a once-oppressed people”, or anything like that.
You can guarantee if constant vuvuzela noise was part of American soccer “tradition”, it would be considered as just more evidence of how loud and obnoxious Americans are, rather than it being a “cultural institution”, and they’d be banned from any international soccer competitions held in the country. The PC crowd tells us to embrace the vuvuzela, but would they be saying the same thing if it was Americans honking away when the World Cup was on these shores?
