JOHANNESBURG - In the right corner, actually the back end of a special football world cup bus, weighing in at a svelte 107 kg, was the great white hope, J Fischel Groundhog - his corner man was his son, a sulky 15-year-old known as Yankel ben-Poepchik - and in the left corner, the driver's end of the bus, was a bespectacled African gent with round, gold-rimmed specs, bearing a remarkable resemblance to an "older" Patrice Lumumba, and weighing about the same amount (as Groundhog - not Lumumba).

Lumumba's corner person was a sulky but otherwise sensible looking woman, maybe a girlfriend, maybe a spouse (I'd say, from her long-suffering look, that she was a spouse) and, while Groundhog was empty-handed, but wearing a Spanish football team cap, Lumumba was clutching a bottle of Budweiser in one hand and a vuvuzela in the other but was bare-headed.

A few minutes before, Groundhog had somewhat peremptorily removed the vuvuzela from Lumumba's mouth and hand - and remarked in passing, as he returned the instrument to Lumumba's hand - remarked with all the subtlety of the book review page in the Sunday Independent - that if Lumumba again blew the longish plastic conch within the confines of the bus, or within 400m of Groundhog's ears, then he, Groundhog, would insert the wider end of the vuvuzela in the aforesaid Lumumba's posterior, without the benefit of a lubricant.

Lumumba seemed to find this remark offensive and, what's more, seemed to believe that it was somehow related to his manhood and epidermal colour - this was, after all, happening in Africa, and in Africa this is, alas, what disputes often come down to - and he staggered down the bus to ask whether Groundhog had "any issues".

Trouble was that the Budweiser - actually anyone who actually drinks that appalling stuff actually deserves whatever happens to him or her in life - the Budweiser did not appear to be Lumumba's first of the day and so "issues" sounded like "sheeshues".

"I can do whatever I want and you can't stop me," opined Lumumba, clearly tired of the years of colonial oppression.

"If I want to blow the vuvuzela, I will. Do you have any sheeshues about that?"

I was not, truth be told, considering a right punch to his chin. It'd been years since I'd done that and I would probably break my fingers. What I was planning, given my not inconsiderable weight advantage and Lumumba's unsteadiness on his pins, was a Joggie Jansen crash tackle - which would, I hoped, floor my adversary, snapping his head back onto the floor and thereby seriously compromise the integrity of his skull.

Then up spoke a fellow from behind: "Please don't blow the vuvuzela inside the bus - you are hurting this little boy's ears so much and frightening him too".

This gave Lumumba pause - but he was too pissed and affronted to pause for too long and he started blowing the vuvuzela again. It was then that his better half intervened and he stopped. But you could cut the tension with a knife. And every 120 seconds or so, Lumumba would remember through the mist of the booze that he was angry and affronted and he would try to start blowing his horn again ...

...But what was a venerable senior citizen such as I doing planning to cause maximum pain to someone who - it occurred to me, since we were both travelling to the Wits park and ride - might have been a fellow Witsie? Heavens, he might even have been the dean of something or other.

Well, having spent a year's salary on a couple of tickets, I had been to the football at Ellis Park with my son - to the third game of the FIFA 2010 world cup, Argentina versus Nigeria - and, having looked at the pages of Politicsweb for these last few days and having seen that few of its writers seem to have been to a game, I thought I would tell you about it.

First thing was that, having been frightened by the perfidious media and the naysayers, we left way too early and arrived for a 16h00 game at about 13h30. In short, we had a very long time to look around, get tired, and have vuvuzelas blown at us.

I'll come back to the vuvuzelas, as I must.

But for the moment let me say that everything worked like (Swiss) clockwork. The bus ride from Wits took 15 minutes. At Ellis Park there seemed to be more marshals, security men and minders than there would be spectators at 4 ‘o' clock.

What about the merchandise? Simple business that: FIFA, headed by Septimus Bluster, has us by the short and curlies. An R80 t-shirt cost R450, a R60 cap cost R200, a coke was R15, and so on and so forth. You're not allowed to buy a plastic bottle of coke or water with a cap on - I'm not entirely certain why - yet you can go into the stands with glass bottle of Bud.

Then of course there were huge clumps of empty seats. Why this was so, notwithstanding there being no tickets for sale, we still do not know.

But the soccer was gorgeous. It is truly a privilege to see a team like the Argentineans and a player like Lionel Messi - and let's not forget the strutting presence of the little, mad, bearded maestro, "la mano de Dios" Maradona - and I think that if it were not for that Jabulani ball, which I sincerely believe we will find was manufactured by the ANC youth league in cahoots with Danny Jordan and Irvin Khoza, I think there would have been more goals.

But, as enjoyable, as the football was - and, let me say, as enjoyable were most of the people around us, after three or four hours the noise starts making your skin crawl.

What is it with Seffricans and the vuvuzela? It's not as though they blow when their team is about to score, or be scored against, or has won or given away a penalty ... they just blow the thing continually. It becomes an obsession, a nervous tic, an illness ... I don't know what it is.

But it does uncover your nerves ... and so the worst thing ol' Lumumba could have done as I boarded the return bus at 18h00 was to have blown his horn in my ear.

We nearly had a full-scale racial incident. But luckily the bus driver seemed to have trouble finding his way back from Ellis Park, through the bad lands of lower Hillbrow and Wolmarans street, to Wits.

And by the time we reached there, we'd all run out of steam. Even Lumumba couldn't muster the strength to blurt his blatter any more.  

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