James Lawton: Sand pitches, townships and hope... why South Africa deserves the cup

The bulldozers pushed on through a quite violent electrical storm here yesterday. Nothing as trivial as the odd flash flood will stop, we are told, the punctual unveiling of the Rainbow Nation's beautifully refurbished, multicoloured Soccer City stadium at the World Cup next June.

Afterwards, though, it would be good if from some of the profits there is a little touching up of Ivory Park, where most days of the week and most hours of the day you can check the pulse of Tembisa, Johannesburg's second-largest township.

There are various estimates of the Tembisa population, starting at around 500,000, crowded into an otherwise barren and largely deserted ridge of veld to the east of the city.

Strictly speaking, you wouldn't call Ivory Park a stadium or the pitch at its centre a football field.

Fans sit on an assortment of ramshackle structures and the players strip out in the open, peacock-proud as they pull on their patchwork colours.

The pitch is sand where it isn't flinty, the goalposts and crossbars do not have nets and long before the end of the first match – there are never fewer than three, involving four teams – the lines drawn for the touchlines and goal areas are, inevitably given the traffic from dawn to dusk, matters of fierce border dispute.

Yet the games get played, relentlessly and with ferocious spirit and moments of wonderful freedom and skill, and the attention of the fans is rarely less than rapt.

Aubrey Thaba, a big and amiable 35-year-old who has a small diamond in his left ear and rejoices in the title of managing director of Rabie United, explains with splendid brevity the reason why he bankrolls his team and gives it all his spare time. "If it wasn't for football I would have been given up to the streets long ago, I would be in prison certainly, though more likely dead."

Sunday in Tembisa was a routine example of competitive township football in places like Soweto, on whose borders in the south-west of the city the great World Cup stadium, shaped as the most thrilling African cooking pot ever designed, has risen like some extraordinary vision of another world, and the smaller but no less teeming and violent Alexandra.

Four teams arrived at Ivory Park in the morning to play knockout games, then the final. Each club paid a thousand rand (slightly less than a £100) into the pot with the winner taking all. "Sometimes we can play three games in the same day," explained Thaba, "but never less than two."

Later this week the competition intensifies. Twenty-four township teams will start a series of games that will result in one champion – and the winner of an accumulated pot. "One problem we don't have," says Thaba, "is the availability of the players. Most of them are unemployed and if they weren't playing football there's a good chance they would be out in the streets committing crime and maybe dying. I love football so much because it gives life. Without it most of the players wouldn't have much at all, only a lot of idle time on their hands."

It also provides a not altogether unviable dream. Kids do make it out of the townships, players like Blackburn's Benni McCarthy, who survived the unpaved streets of Cape Town's notorious Hanover Park, an area of Doomsday unemployment and unremitting gang violence. "You do not discourage such hopes," says Thaba, "but you try to keep them realistic. Three of our players went on to professional football here, but it didn't really work out for them. They had problems with contracts and payments, but they still value football, still see what it did for their self-respect."

In fact, there is a fantasy closer to home than the one claimed by McCarthy in Oporto under Jose Mourinho and then Blackburn. It is to land a contract with one of the South African Premier League teams, most lucratively the Mamelodi Sundowns, who are owned by Patrice Motsepe.

Motsepe, a black lawyer, is widely seen as the chief beneficiary of the "empowerment" policy of the new South Africa, the attempt to redistribute some of the riches amassed so unevenly in the days of apartheid. His empowerment was a slice of the precious metal mining industry, which has left him a rand billionaire several times over. It doesn't quite make him the African Abramovich but, like the oligarch Russian, he is sometimes pressed to lavish more of his time and his money on football.

This week Motsepe found it necessary to explain at least partly why his Sundowns are currently in something of an eclipse, nine points off the title pace. He said: "It's a pity this global [financial] crisis has been taking my time – but I have to put my head in it. I can't take all my time and focus on the Sundowns. If we don't make money in the mines, we may not be able to pay the players."

It is maybe not what Karl Marx had in my mind, but then the average township dweller would probably say that any kind of trickle down is better than nothing.

Meanwhile, managing director Thabe is currently rebuilding the morale of a team that suffered, along with a few marble-sized hailstones fired from a storm-laden sky, some sharp disappointment when night fell on Sunday's action. Having beaten the Coastal Stars 2-0 in the semi-final, they crumbled 5-1 to an impressively united Colchester. One spectator, Joshua Malatji, who at 39 regularly appears on a secondary pitch for the Old Crocks, observed wistfully: "They should have held something back from the first match but, of course, many of them are still young – and impetuous."

"It a bad blow," said Thabe. "The team was down afterwards because we beat Colchester 3-1 on Saturday." Not helping matters was the fact the team's raiding full-back, 24-year-old Peter Ramoshaba, failed a fitness test before the second match. It was hardly a surprise in that he had limped through most of the second half of the earlier game.

Ramoshaba, who wears an Arsenal badge on his team shirt, said: "It's terrible to miss a match. Whatever comes in the week, you say, I still have football."

Thaba is a township entrepreneur when he isn't managing director of Rabie United. He runs school buses and has a catering service for weddings and other celebrations. When the thousand rand football deposit is lost, he pays for food and team kit out of his own pocket.

"When we win the money mostly goes on kit, new socks or boots, but sometimes I try to give the team a little money for themselves. Every so often I think it's good to open a surprise package. Football is great and I can't imagine what we would do without it, but sometimes you have to provide something else on top. You have to tell the young men that football isn't the only good thing in life."

If Rabie United regain their momentum in the coming weeks the budget for one of Thaba's surprise packages will be dramatically enhanced. The winning team in the big tournament claims a whopping 100,000 rand, with 10,000 going to the losing finalist and the winner of the third-place game.

"We would be the smartest team around, no doubt, if we won the prize but that would not be the most important thing," says the managing director. "The great thing would be the sense of achievement, the feeling that you have done something special, that you are somebody to be admired.

"Feeling like that is not so easy when you sit around most days with nothing to do, without any real incentive, and somebody is telling you that you can make some money if you commit a crime. You cannot keep all the young men off the street, you cannot stop all the waste, but if there is something you can do, you must do it.

"I know football saved my life and I know it could do that for some members of another generation."

Some say that there are too many perils attached to this coming World Cup. They talk about the problems of security, the crime rate and they say that football's greatest tournament should really have gone, as is usually the case, to somewhere rich and relatively antiseptic. They say that coming to a country with still so many problems to resolve is simply reckless.

It would be a better argument if its advocates could explain quite how football became the world's most popular game – and perhaps concede that it has always drawn its greatest talent and beauty from the poorest neighbourhoods. Certainly, a long but enriching day in a place like Tembisa would help to inform the debate.