Why Africa will be biggest winner of the 2010 World Cup

The 32 nations are in their groups, Fifa president Sepp Blatter has finished flirting with the television presenter – and everyone seems to think England have an easy draw.

But the image that remains in the memory from last night’s World Cup draw here is not the expressions on the faces of men like Fabio Capello when they discovered their team’s fate.

It is the sight of Nelson Mandela, old and frail now, but still the personification of all that is dignified and fine in humanity, staring out at the star-studded audience in the Cape Town Convention Centre through a camera.

His message to a sporting world salivating about who was going to play who, where and when was beautifully simple. “It’s time,” he said.

It is time, too. Time for England to prove that they are strong enough mentally not just to get out of a relatively easy group but that they can deal with what comes next.

Because it does not look like such a great draw when you consider that our likely second round opponents are Ghana or Serbia, both fine sides, both better than the Ecuador team England struggled to beat at the same stage in Germany four years ago.

But more than that, it’s time for football and its supporters finally to embrace the prospect of Africa staging the biggest event in sport.

Time to realise that this is going to be an event heavy with significance and symbolism, a tournament that is about more than a series of football matches.

It’s about Africa taking centre stage at last, about changing perceptions of South Africa and, at least in some small ways, improving the lot of some of the people who live here.

Time to stop worrying about perceived problems and start realising that this is going to be one of the greatest and most joyous celebrations of the sport there has ever been.

Time to start thinking about the residents of Soweto who are so desperate to transform negative perceptions of their country that they are inviting supporters to stay with them in their homes during the tournament.

That way, they can see that life in the townships is not all about murder, rape and drunkenness. That way, they can see life there can be vibrant and full of warmth and hospitality.

“You have been to Soweto,” Bareng-Bartho Kortjaas, a senior writer for the Sunday Times in South Africa told me yesterday. “Did you need a police escort? Did a black man come running after you with a machete?

“Even this morning, I saw a television report from Britain saying that our stadiums are all ready but that it doesn’t matter because some of our people don’t have running water.

“But we never said that the World Cup would bring everybody water. We never said it would cure everything. Come on, what crime have we committed that people should say these things about us?”