Wozafriday

Last night was a disaster, England lost to Croatia at Wembley. I was there and it was awful.

In the pouring rain England were outplayed and out-thought, their Euro dream washed away and with it my football holiday to Austria/Switzerland in the summer of 2008. Bloody morons!

I have been to dozens of new stadiums around the world so I was really looking forward to my first experience at the new Wembley Stadium. I have missed every game since the Stadium opened, I have either been in the US or in the case of the FA Cup Final, I voluntarily gave up my ticket for a mate’s birthday (and I won’t let him forget it).

I love going to England games, the passion, the noise, the general camaraderie. Last night I witnessed none of it (other than 5 minutes of the game when England had drawn level).  I think the new stadium has a crowd problem, the fans are not the same as before, not as vocal, not as loud. It may have been a combination of nerves, stadium design, the rain or even the fact that the new Wembley is now largely attended by the “prawn sandwich” brigade but one thing is certain, the crowd is lacking something. England fans, Wembley is waiting, where are you?

To say the stadium was a waste of money would be the understatement of the year. It is diabolical that over £800 million was spent on creating such a lifeless, boring bowl. It may look pretty from aerial photos or night shots but inside the ground it is simply atrocious. I judge stadiums by their atmosphere, defining features or uniqueness. Sadly Wembley has none of these.

What it does have is logistical problems, plenty of them. England has still not managed to master selling food and drink at stadiums. Queues everywhere until they run out. Its surprising there are any queues at all considering a hotdog costs £4 and a disgusting english burger and chips costs more than £7!

Generally it would take a good 45 minutes to get from the stadium to the train station, standing in huge queues in the pouring rain was not something we felt like doing after such a poor result. So instead we found a pub nearby and waited for the crowds to diminish. All told a really bad night made worse by my disappointment at the £800 million it took to create the greatest stadium flop on earth.

British Airways is pathetic. I have given them considerably more than £10,000 worth of businees over the past couple of years and yet when I make a simple spelling mistake on a booking they insist on charging me £25.

This is the kind of service I have come to expect from British Airways, a national “premium service” carrier with no accountability to its customers whatsoever. I thought I’d check what the budget airlines charge for minor spelling mistake correction, so I called Easyjet and was told they do not charge for this!!

I guess thats why Easyjet are now making all the right headlines and British Airways stagger from one disaster to the next:

It lost 20,000 passengers’ bags, was fined £270 million for collusion and one-third of its flights were late, but British Airways still managed to hike its profits by 26 per cent this summer. (Link)

This incident has also reminded me of my worst airline incident to date, it happened back in April 2007 in Chicago, and yet AGAIN British Airways were at fault. At the time I wrote a letter to BA detailing the incident, I am still waiting for a response, 8 months later……

Read the letter detailing my ordeal below:

Read the rest of this entry »

So whilst watching some of the South Africa vs New Zealand test match today I noticed that the muslim player Hashim Amla does not wear the sponsors logo - Castle lager. Maybe this is old news in SA but I haven’t been aware of it until now. How pathetic that SA Cricket allows this and furthermore that Castle Lager stands for it. This man is allowed to flout rules which apply to everyone else based on his “religion”. SA Cricket is weak, the sport itself is weak judging by Sunday’s attendance at the test match I watched and in comparison to its nearest relative - Baseball - it is dying a slow death.

As well as being an official Olympic sport in Beijing next year, Baseball had a record season in 2007 with revenues topping $6 billion. With the T20 and the world cup this year, I’d love to know how much cricket made.

Yeah but this ain’t no ordinary baker, its Tiger Brands trading as Albany, a household name in South Africa. Turns out they have been colluding with other members of the bread bakers oligopoly in South Africa to fix price increases. This type of collusion within an oligopoly is commonly referred to as a cartel, but unlike some of the other more famous cartels trading in diamonds and oil, this cartel provides a staple food product in a country where thousands of people live below the poverty line.

Only yesterday I wrote about the Airline (and cellphone network) oligopoly in South Africa, now it appears we have a bread oligopoly cartel. Could it be that South Africa is the land of the cartel/oligopoly, just try thinking of a few yourself, maybe start with the paper industry, the sugar industry………

PS: There are many other fascinating oligopoly, duopoly theories you may want to research. Yesterday I mentioned Nash Equilibrium but there are many other economic (and game) theories which apply to oligopoly’s such as the Stackelberg or Cournot or Bertrand competition.

Frustrating at times but overall I’d say its the best phone I’ve ever had. I’ll try and avoid raising common known irritations such as ringtones etc and I’ll refrain from stating the obvious benefits everyone already knows.

Pro’s

The interface, by far the best of any phone I have had, and YES, I have owned an HTC Touch and it is rubbish!

The standard apps like iPod, photo’s, youtube, google maps, phone all work as they are intended to. No lag, delays or crashing….. a welcome change from other pretenters to the crown.

Don’t be put off by EDGE, its actually quicker than I expected and in London there are loads of free wifi hotspots the phone will automatically connect to.

Cons

- Mail doesn’t allow search or list functions, so its basically like SMS 0.1, what the hell were they thinking.

- No cut and paste function. WTF?

- Battery life isn’t that great, you’ll need to be frugal with wifi, bluetooth, videos, ipod etc if you want it to last the WHOLE weekend! I must have played with it a lot because mine did not even last 24 hours.

- Its as slippery as a fish wearing a banana skin jacket! I dropped it in a gooey bowl of icecream within the first 24 hours. I licked off all the icecream and sucked the chocolate sauce out of the cracks - I recommend getting the silicone cover.

- It really takes a long time to charge when synced up with my Macbook, no idea why, but make sure you allow a good few hours for charging if you are charging through your laptop.

- Don’t look at other peoples hacked phones, you will become jealous because yours looks lame and doesn’t have any interesting apps on it (web apps suck ok). Roll on February 2008 when hopefully the true potential of this phone will be unleashed!

NB: This refers to last weekend, I tried posting this but my web hosting company blocked access to my site.

Heavy weekend. Started it off in Putney with a trip to Zulus to watch Kevin “Michael Naicker” Perkins, classic stuff the guy is hysterical, heard a lot of it before but he is still well worth seeing. Haven’t been to that side of the world in many months so we decided to spread ourselves around, hit Zulus, Thai Square and then Fez club all in one horrible booze fueled night, it ended up with a basketball game at 5am on a council estate court outside a mates house in London Bridge.

Instead of going home, I went straight to the Emirates stadium to watch the football in a pub outside the ground with Russ. Starting drinking again before 1pm and by the end of the game I’d thrown a few too many lagers down my neck to realise that I was running late. Train home, afternoon hangover hits, get ready for the seventies night at Carwash and head back into London.

Carwash was fantastic, full on seventies revival night, everybody dressed up in their disco best, bopping along to the classic tunes of the era. We had a blast but another 5am to bed and dreadful train journey home the next morning laid me out for the rest of Sunday. Roll on this week when hopefully I can take it easy and recover!

I have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to obtain the cheapest flights between Joburg and Cape Town. Its really amazing the number of conventional (SAA, BA, Nationwide) and low cost (Mango, 1Time, Kulula) airline operators in South Africa, and based on my experience using all of them over the last few years, they all generally provide an excellent service relative to other airlines I have flown around the world. My favourite domestic airline is 1Time, mainly due to a combination of excellent service, price, comfortable cabins and punctuality.

I do have one major gripe with the South African domestic airlines though - their websites are pants! Like cellphones, where in nearly every case a phone is perfect except for a few niggly issues which each brand or model fails to perfect, the websites for each of the airlines mentioned above have their own particular glitches, some of which are very annoying. It will take me too long to mention all the frustrations encountered on each website but to provide some proof of my allegations I will give a few quick examples.

The biggest airline in South Africa which also happens to be our national carrier, SAA, can’t even configure their website for Firefox without allowing a few glitches to slip through, try it and see. It might take you a while too, considering their load time was by far the longest out of the 6 airlines.

Try Mango’s website, get all the way to the end and then, oops, you need to change a time or maybe a date, use your browser back button or the button provided on the actual page, and you get sent right back to the homepage, you’ll need to put all the information in again.

1Time has a similar problem but the coding on the website itself allows you to go backwards and forwards during the booking process, just don’t use that browser back button. They also don’t have a calendar function anywhere on their home page, so you have to manually input the dates and need a seperate calendar to confirm the actual day eg. Monday, Tuesday etc. You’d think calendar input should be standard on any travel website.

Nationwide has a pretty decent system which seems to work really quickly, until it comes to selecting the actual flights you want. They have chosen to do things differently to the other 5 airlines by scheduling the inbound and outboud flights together which makes it really difficult to select the exact inbound and outbound times you desire. I gave up and moved on, no time for that kind of bother.

Why does all this matter, surely if they are all pretty much the same, you will take a few minutes extra and go with the cheapest one?

Well thats the problem, they are all priced almost exactly the same, the low cost airlines are around R1300 - R1400 and the conventional airlines are roughly R1350 - R1450. So certainly not enough variance to differentiate them on price, nor is there really enough to differentiate them on service (in my opinion, and not taking into account after-sales service). So perhaps the most important sales weapon is…..wait for it….. the website  - which in the case of modern airlines now doubles as everything from a shop front window to an honest and helpful salesman!

Unfortunately although they’re all really different in appearance, the websites are all just as bad as each other. You’d think that in this supposedly “competitive” market a bit of money invested in a really efficient and user friendly website might give one airline a competive edge over another.

Or would it….? Well, as it turns out maybe not! Maybe most bookings are done over the phone, maybe the percentage of online bookings is really small in a country with limited internet connectivity, maybe the airlines don’t really care because the customers have no real alternatives, maybe the website ACTUALLY doesn’t matter!!

Like cellphone networks, the airlines aren’t really in competition, they have an oligopoly and there is some kind of weird Nash Equilibrium in place where nobody believes that achieving the perfect booking site will actually increase profits, especially seeing as the rest of the cartel group will just copy the perfect site and there will be no change in turnover! Now its easy to see why they are complacent and the customer, going forward, is just going to have to put up with rubbish websites!

OK, so having vented my frustrations, who am I going to go with? Well ultimately 2 things have become the dealbreaker, brand loyalty to 1Time or going with BA and getting the airmiles.  So I am flying BA down to Cape Town and 1Time on the way back!

Lastly, I often get asked who my favourite airline is, for the record the answer is very easy:

Best International Airline - Qantas (Australia)

Best Domestic Airline - 1Time (South Africa)

Somewhere in and amongst the mayhem that was my weekend I managed to get hold of one of the greatest gadgets of 2007 in the new Aliph Jawbone bluetooth noise cancelling headset.

When I first saw the Jawbone in the US a few months ago I knew straight away I had to have one in the UK. Considering the new draconian laws here regarding driving and calling, this little beauty is not just a pleasure to use, it is also going to save me a lot of money and points on my license. Of course, its main selling point is the noise cancelling function which, given that I drive a convertible, should come in very handy, I shall just have to wait until summer to find out.

I figure that playing with the Jawbone this week is the perfect pre-cursor to my impending acquisiton of the iPhone which launches this Friday. I played around with the iPhone in the states when it launched and I’ve also spoken to a few iPhone users, so I know I want it and I also know that its way better than the slow, overhyped, bug-ridden HTC Touch that I have been using for the last 3 months. Even though I have used them for over 3 years now I have really begun to hate Windows Mobile phones, I guess Apple can take a bit of credit for that.

Driverlane really kicks ass and I have been waiting for them to release their debut album for almost a year now, what the hell is taking so long guys? Last year back in SA we were lucky enough to catch a couple of Driverlane gigs, one in Durban and another one in Cape Town. Although I was already a fan of their music before, the stuff they played live blew me away. I’m really hoping to see them again this December and pick up their new album.

I was asked today by a friend from SA whether Razorlight are any good live…..hello….they’re brilliant! I have seen them live three times now and I’d say they’re at least as good as Driverlane, both well worth seeing.

Click here to listen to their new catchy single Radio, the already immensely popular Regular Flavour and the title song from their long awaited new album, Digital Rainbow.

A great day but ultimately just a sports result. I for one am not getting carried away with the political insinuation that this will further unify our country, what bollocks, we won the world cup, we didn’t eradicate crime or build a million houses etc. It may help to resurrect the sport of rugby as a national game, but without a commitment from the public, the rugby community and the government it will become merely a memory of a few days where the South African nation shared a common goal.

What did the World Cup mean to me? Well, I am South African and will always be, I love sport, all sport, and I really love rugby, so this was one of the greatest sporting occasions of my life.

I have feelings of slight guilt that I so vehemently supported South Africa and spent such a vast quantity of money being there. I haven’t lived in SA for almost 5 years and have contributed very little to the economy and well-being of my homeland, but neither do I withdraw anything from SA, on the contrary I relentlessly promote my home country globally.

I have never complained about quotas in sport, certainly not in rugby, and I realise that whilst away from SA I personally cannot help with rugby development, so I accept any measure that those in government seek to redress the racial imbalance in the team.

I think that instead of moaning about picking teams on merit etc. the rugby fraternity should get out there and capitalise on this momentous win and sponsor development, sponsor players, sponsor teams and sponsor infrastructure. . If you really care about rugby and the future of the sport in SA then give some precious time to coaching and nurturing youngsters in traditionally non rugby environments. Otherwise, like me, you must simply accept that it will continue to be a marginal sport in our great country and government spending on the sport will continue to fall aginast its primary competitor - soccer. And therein lies the crisis for rugby, not that politicians are involved, which I agree is ludicrous, but that government spending on rugby will all but dry up, and rightly so.

Understandably now, rugby and politics are inseparable, but I hope that finally, what the support shown by the entire nation for this win might also do, is provide proof to the politicians, rugby fraternity and general public that this is just a sports team, loved by all because they represent one country and not just one sector of our nation. That is all. I hope to see the same support for the Soccer Team in 2010!

We are the World Champions and I was there to witness it. Thats a great feeling, almost as good as it felt to be there, to soak up the whole day with friends and family, then to celebrate like I had been given 24 hours to live!

This World Cup has been one helluva journey and I have experienced some wonderful lifefulfilling moments. And finally, 7 weeks after the tournament started we have been crowned Champions of the World.

I learnt La Marsellaise and La Pena Baiona, I drank Ricard and Get27 and lots of wine, I ate Tartare and Foie Gras, my face was permanently covered in the paint markings of the Tricolor from cheek kissing both men and women, I danced along to hundreds of brass bands and made friends with people from all over the country, from Carcasonne, Montpellier, Marseille, Reims, Toulon, Nice, Tours and of course Paris!

As a final goodbye I have made a sequenced photo montage of each trip to France with music reminiscent of my time out there - France, amis pour la vie!

Although the BBC Rugby World Cup blog took a lot of flack for wasting the British public’s money, I was grateful that they finally spent money on something worthwhile. And Ben Dirs has proved that with his brilliant post capturing the entire spirit of this magical World Cup. Go and read it right now, to either reminisce over the time you spent in France or to realise what exactly you missed out on, simply the best World Cup EVER!

Eventually I have secured tickets to the World Cup Final.

This is going to be the culmination of a 4 year chapter in my life. I left South Africa four years ago so I could come to London and work for six months before embarking on a month long trip to Australia to watch the World Cup in 2003 . Now, four years later, I have been on a  month long soiree in France for the  World Cup 2007 culminating in what I hope will be a victory for the Springboks on Saturday.

Could my time in the UK be up, I suppose it depends on what happens Saturday!

The biggest game of rugby in the last 4 years is almost upon us. I am going over to Paris tomorrow still without tickets but highly confident that I will be in the Stade de France to witness South Africa’s crowning as World Champions!

Finals are particularly difficult games to call, but I believe it will be a very tight game and as with the Argentina game I think we should put England under pressure and play a territory game as I don’t believe they have the skill to take us on, whereas if they make a mistake we have the ability to capitalise out wide.

Easily the most important player for SA on the day will be Butch James. I have said it for years, Butch James is by far the best flyhalf in SA and there is no way we would be where we are without him. He is the best distributer of the ball in world rugby and has played magnificently during the entire world cup. If on Saturday he tackles well and controls the game like he has done throughout the tournament the Springboks will strangle England and win convincingly.

That being said though, if Percy Montgomery has an off day with the boot and the team starts the first 20 minutes nervously we may be in for a tough ride.

It is John Smits destiny and that of the rest of this team that the trophy will be South Africas this weekend. I hope like hell we go out and play like it is ours. Come on Bokke!!!

Note: I am still looking for at least 4 tickets to the FINAL, if anybody has any to sell please get in touch with me, leave a comment here and I will get back to you!

Tomorrow I leave for what will be my third trip to France and the penulitmate one before going to the Final next weekend. So far this World Cup has been utterly amazing, games have been exciting and things have gone our way up to now. I think that all four teams have a 50-50 chance of winning, I would love to see a South Africa v France final, its the game I wished for at the beginning of the tournament and if all goes according to plan its the game we should get. IF England beat France I will be annoyed, the atmosphere won’t be great this Saturday if France lose but next weekend every Frenchman and his poodle will be supporting the Springboks against England.

Last weekend the atmosphere down in Marseille was fantastic, we stayed on the coast in a small beach resort town called Six Four Les Plages, and yet again I mixed a lot of alcohol, a lot of rugby and plenty all-night parties! I really enjoyed our time down on the Cote d’Azure, the weather was brilliant, the people were great and the passion they showed over the weekend really made for a great time.

Tomorrow we hop on the Eurostar and head over to Paris, I have taught myself the words to La Marseillaise and I am gonna be belting it out along with 50,000 other Frenchmen! I hope the English get stuffed this weekend, one bloody win against Australia and now they think they are the best team in the world. Lets face it Australia had a crap team and they’re missing Larkham, it wasn’t THAT difficult to beat them.

And could the Kiwis please just shut-up and quit whining, you lost against France in the Quarter-Final, deal with it, the best teams in the world DO NOT LOSE in Quarter-Finals. You choked and you’re going home like you do at every world Cup with a lame excuse. If you want to talk referees lets discuss kiwi Steve Walsh (who incidentally has been appointed to referee the Springboks semi-final) and his blatant mistake which cost the Sharks the Super 14 final this year, just look at this if you need proof! If any team in the world has been hard done by when it comes to referees its the Springboks and I’ve never heard a peep out of any Kiwi in support of us before, so you’ll get NO sympathy from me now either, go back to your little island, get that chip on your shoulder sorted out and start practising for 2011.

Onto Argentina, what a fantastic World Cup they’re having, they have beaten France, Ireland and Scotland so far and have arguably produced the player of the tournament in Juan Hernandez their flyhalf. South Africa should beat them, we have never lost to them, but its a world cup semi-final and anything can happen. As long as we play a tight game, and yes, I am advocating a kicking game similar to the way we played against England and make sure we close down Pichot and Hernandez, I think Argentina will play the ball back into our hands and in one or two movements we could score whereas they may struggle to score against us. I predict a really tight game and I am not really looking forward to watching yet another nailbiting finish!

My final prediction though is that John Smit will raise the world cup above his head next weekend*, its his destiny and he will be remembered as one of the greatest captains ever, and the Springboks will once again be the World Champions!

*I’m thinking with my heart here, so its more hope than an actual prediciton!