JOHANNESBURG. The creators of Friday’s World Cup opening ceremony have angrily denied accusations that they plagiarised the entire show from a Standard Grade Remedial Folk-dancing project at a Limpopo reformatory. However, this morning they conceded that having a giant dung-beetle roll a football – thereby implying that football is crap – “might have sent the wrong message”.
Local and international media described the 40-minute spectacle as vibrant, scintillating, ground-breaking, inspiring, and 25 other adjectives on FIFA’s official list of words to be used by journalists who wish to keep their media accreditation.
However, many spectators confessed that they were left with an overwhelming sense that the show had been cobbled together the day before by people with severe learning disabilities.
According to one witness who was too frightened to give his name, he had become suspicious when the winner of an Algerian Tom Jones lookalike contest was invited to sing a pop song in Arabic, and just moments later an anonymous man in a wheelchair was rolled out to mid-pitch where he proceeded to do nothing.
“And why was the stadium so empty?” he asked. “We won the bid in 2004. Surely six years is enough time to get to your seat?”
Other spectators wondered why, when performers created a FIFA logo, there was a hole in the map where South Africa should have been.
Angry allegations flew last night after Buttercup Cele, a Remedial Folk-dancing teacher at the Baby Jesus’s Vengeful Mercy Punitive Youth Compound in Limpopo claimed that the entire show had been stolen from her Standard Grade class.
However, this morning the show’s creators hit back, saying that everything had been their idea, including the man in the wheelchair and the hole in the FIFA logo.
“The confusion and anger you felt as spectators is the same confusion and anger felt by disabled people who cannot access toilets, discos and other amenities that don’t have ramps,” explained lead choreographer, Cadenza Simela.
“As for the hole in logo, that represents poverty and racism, plus unreliable taxis that can’t get Denzil and his map-placard to the stadium half an hour before showtime like I told him. But mostly poverty and racism.”
She also explained that the large footprints leaving Africa had represented the Diaspora, and not, as was widely believed, state assets being stripped by African leaders, closely followed by refugees fleeing the continent.
But, she said, she and her creative team “might have sent the wrong message” with the large dung-beetle that opened the show.
“We’d just like to reiterate to Mr Blatter and his colleagues: we do not think football is shit, even though we implied that it was.”
Asked why her team had chosen as its centrepiece an insect that lives on poo, when they could have chosen any one of Africa’s majestic Big Five species, Simela explained that “time and talent” had been against them.
“The lions and elephants needed about three days of rehearsal, plus people who were moderately co-ordinated or had all their own limbs,” she said.
“We had 36 hours, and 500 people we recruited at soup-kitchens in Hillbrow. It was always going to be a dung-beetle.”
