Francois Pienaar on the IPL

With my dogged persistence, and his generosity – not to mention the miracle of hands-free mobiles – I interviewed Francois Pienaar a few days ago (here, at our sister site, Scrum.com). I couldn’t ignore the opportunity to talk about the IPL. Our chat was brief, but his passion for South Africa and all it stands for remains undiminished, 14 years after he stood on the podium to receive the rugby World Cup from Nelson Mandela. It’s one of those sporting images tattooed on your skull and difficult to forget. Tyson and Bruno is another of mine. Gascoigne in tears. Flintoff and Lee. Tyson eating ears…

But anyway. IPL. I wanted to find out from Pienaar his thoughts on South Africa’s infrastructure, given that all of a sudden it is the go-to country to host world-class sporting events. “The IPL has been a journey and a half,” he said. “To put this tournament in place in 20 days flat has been inspirational, to be honest.”

Colleagues and residents of Johannesburg have shown a little less enthusiasm, in particular at the road networks. Yes, they’re being modernised, widened, and coating a layer of western tarmac over the top of the concrete (which doesn’t split as easily in the heat, I’m told), but there is so much to be done. Recently, the Australia (cricket) team were politely mobbed (oxymoron spotters, pat yourselves on the back) at an airport, so lax was the security. I naively enquired about the train infrastructure to a taxi driver when I first arrived. “You’d be dead man, dead,” was the chilling response. There is a train for tourists with tourist-like prices, but suffice to say that it’ll be cars and planes which transport people over the next few weeks.

What will it be like in 2010 for the (football) World Cup, though?

Well, judging by the successful events they have hosted in the past – 1995 rugby World Cup, 2003 cricket World Cup and the inaugural World Twenty20 in 2007 – the answer is: it’ll be fine. It’ll probably be better than fine, to witness the steady progress of all the new stadia being built. As Telford Vice wrote a few days ago for Cricinfo, “neither airlines, hotels nor the cricket industry seemed flustered by the prospect of the gathering storm of glitz, glamour and glorious cricket.”

Pienaar, too, acknowledged the country’s sticky issues and congested roads but, like Telford, he just expects it to happen. And after three weeks here, I do too. “The country has a can-do mentality. We are a nation who holds up its hands and gets things done.”