JOHANNESBURG, Jan 26: South African organisers of the 2010 World Cup on Monday lamented the lack of excitement across the host country ahead of the biggest global football fiesta.

“The challenge is that not everybody has internalised the magnitude of this event,” the chairman of the 2010 FIFA World Cup Organising Committee (LOC), Irvin Khosa, said on a radio interview to mark 500 days to go to the event.

“This World Cup should not be World Cup of Irvin Khosa, Danny Jordaan (chief executive of LOC), the LOC and the board. It is a World Cup for 45 million South Africans. It is important that we embrace this World Cup because it is our World Cup,” he said.

The LOC believed that the anticipated economic boom the World Cup was expected to bring to South Africa would help the country cushion the effect of the current global financial crisis, Khosa said.

“In terms of taxes anticipated, selling of broadcast rights, tickets demand, we can only see a boom in this World Cup. It will help to mitigate what might have taken South Africa to a recession mode,” he also said.

Jordaan told a radio programme that the board of the LOC will hold a key meeting later in the day with senior FIFA officials, including the body’s secretary general Jerome Valcke.

The meeting will discuss a number of issues, including protocol matters relating to the 2010 World Cup and the Confederations Cup to be staged in June in South Africa.

Mayors and representatives of all the country’s nine 2010 FIFA World Cup host cities will also converge later Monday in Mangaung (Bloemfontein), the capital of South Africa’s central Free State Province, for the national unveiling of the host city posters, it said.

The 48,000-seat capacity Mangaung stadium, currently under construction, is one of the 10 venues to be used for the World Cup.

“All the 10 stadiums will be completed by the end of this year... for Africa’s first World Cup after 104 years in world football,” Jordaan said.—AFP