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AS long as no one scored, it was always going to be close. Or we lost because we didn't win. Until I watched SBS's coverage of the World Cup four years ago the comic profundities of television soccer commentators always reminded me of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and its wonderful baggy-pants clowns Vladimir and Estragon, desperately waiting for something to happen. The game seemed all middle: like Godot's funny tramps, we never stopped waiting for goals that never seemed to arrive. At least not often enough for my liking.

In soccer, as in theatre, I used to think, there is a very thin line between teasing the audience with the threat of agonising boredom and actually be boring.

Be assured this won't be the case with SBS's coverage of the 2010 World Cup starting in Johannesburg on Friday, June 11, in the newly renovated and highly symbolic Orlando Stadium. Based in the heart of Soweto, on Mooki Street on the eastern edge of one of the once troubled precinct's first suburbs, the 45,000-seat sports complex is a stone's throw from where the anti-apartheid student uprising erupted in 1976.