The World Cup has started at last.

I watched the pre-tournament concert on TV on Thursday night, which was a bit disappointing.  Instead of showing it live, the BBC showed edited highlights, but their idea of a highlight is not necessarily mine.  For example, Amadou & Mariam were on the bill but didn’t feature at all on the BBC, and Hugh Masakela was cut off in mid-song at the start.  On the plus side, they did show Angelique Kidjo doing a couple of songs.They did show a longer version in the early hours of Friday morning so I set the V+ up to record that and will FF through it to see if there is any Amadou & Mariam on it, or any other good stuff missed from the edited version.  I was very impressed by a Colombian singer they had on there called Juanes and of course the other Colombian, Shakira.   Which seems like a good excuse to embed yet another Shakira video…

[youtube@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmB4ZZF_uA]

I think we can all agree that is a lot better than watching Terry Venables’s effort!  I usually dislike the use of autotune, but if ever a record was crying out for it then it is Venables’ excruciating effort.

Very surprised to see Johnny Clegg didn’t feature in the concert at all.  I would have thought he was guaranteed to be in it.

I saw a bit of the opening ceremony on Portugese TV, because it was one while I was having my traditional Friday late breakfast in the Cafe Santa Maria .   I only caught the end plus some highlights but it looked pretty good, all those people dancing away to one of Femi Kuti’s hits.

Got home to see the kick off of the first game, which was a bit of an anti-climax after all the build up.  Before the game started it was hard to not be overwhelmed by the idea of the World Cup not only being in Africa but being in South Africa.  It doesn’t seem like that long ago apartheid was in full force and yet there was the black football ex-captain and the white rugby captain on TV talking about one nation.  It is hard not to be affected, but as a West Ham supporter I am used to feeling like crying while watching football.

I have to admit that I fell asleep at around half time and only woke up to see the second half of the France/Uruguay game, which didn’t look great either.  France did not look great which is a shame because I drew them in the work sweepstake.  I’ll have to hope that the other team I drew do better, but since that is New Zealand I am not counting my winnings just yet.

Shouldn’t complain too much about the BBC’s coverage of the concert though.   It might be annoying that they choose to spend time with Trevor Nelson talking that they could have used to show another song, but at least they don’t do what this (Bulgarian?) channel does and talk over anything they are not interested in…