Nelspruit, Mpumalanga

Father’s Day with family on the road to Italy-New Zealand. It doesn’t get any better than this! There are six of us in the van, including Ignazio and Marco just in from Rome. We are all rigorously decked out in Italy jerseys. With Igna at the wheel, we leave Joburg around 9am. The Sunday journey is smooth and we go by sleepy towns — ‘burgs’ ‘dorps’ and ‘fonteins’ — in the winter Low Veld.

Our first and only pit stop is at a service station with many Azzurri fans. Listening to them speak, I realize that very few are actually Italians. Most are South Africans of various backgrounds buying into the Italy brand — we dub them ‘Fake Italians’.

Back on the road we wind out way through the canyons of Mpumalanga. The scenic road is treacherous and we make a note of that for the postmatch return trip. 3.5 hours later we are outside Nelspruit, but miss the stadium exit due to poor signage. A burly yet friendly traffic cop on the freeway points the way back to it: ‘Make a safe u-turn,’ he tells us with a smile, ‘we don’t want you to die in South Africa.’

Ten minutes (and no signs) later we are at the Riverside Mall park-and-ride, but it’s full so we go to the Showgrounds instead. That country fair feeling again, shades of Polokwane. Our crew boards the bus, there are more ‘Fake Italians’! At 2:45 we arrive outside the Mbombela Stadium perched at the top of a hill with nothing around it. The landscaping is not finished so the ground has a construction site feel to it. It’s built on a land claim, entailed forced removals of two schools, and the corruption connected to the building of the stadium led to the murder of two whistleblowers.

But we are thinking of the match not blood and bribery. Will the Azzurri deliver against NZ? The answer becomes clear immediately after kick off. On the Kiwis first sniff of our goal they score. Oh my. Drunken New Zealanders just got more annoying, as they would spend the rest of the match hurling insults at the Azzurri. I reciprocate in kind when Iaquinta levels the score on a penalty midway through the first half. Italy seems bent on imitating lackluster France in this World Cup. It ends 1-1, which the All-White fans celebrate as if they had won the World Cup.

I gloomily exit the arena with kids in hand thinking of what might have been with Balotelli, Cassano . . . The Fake Italians don’t seem affected by this embarrassing draw. Brand loyalty is about consumption and vicarious association, not nausea and disgust at having driven 370km to endure unforgivably pathetic football against a team ranked 107 in the FIFA rankings.

We shuffle our way through the crowd at the shuttle buses and jump on board. Within a few minutes we are at the Showgrounds park-and-ride and our diesel engine is rumbling. It’s dark when we leave Nelspruit for Joburg. We drive cautiously, thinking about Netherlands-Italy in the round of 16 (we have Durban tickets) and the ‘High Accident Zones’ signs on the road. An Opel Corsa and several other cars with Gauteng license plates pass us. An all-encompassing foul odor fills the odor — it’s coming from a huge saw mill — ‘Who farted’? the children joke.

Then, two minutes later, a horrific scene. The Corsa that just passed us is a smoking carcass on the side of the road. A bakkie is overturned on the other side. A third car is crumpled. We order the kids not to look, but they do and are terribly shaken by the accident that happened maybe 2 minutes before. We drive even more carefully the rest of the way. On Monday, Radio 702 announces that four young South Africans died in the crash near Belfast, Mpumalanga. They were Italy supporters. Our condolences to their families. Today, there are no Fake Italians.