Day 11: Agony in Rustenburg

Now I'm really sad. The Ghana game was there for the taking, and we fluffed it, with some help from the referee.

Another 5am start for bus to the airport, then a flight to Joburg, before hopping on another bus for a long drive to Rustenburg. We park in a field outside the stadium, and there's nothing else there. Just a few houses and souvenir sellers trying to sell New Zealand flags. Sorry, guys, might look the same to you, but you'll be wallpapering your bedroom with those before you find a buyer.

The area is home to the two largest platinum mines in the world, but the whole region has only 180,000 people, and a stadium that holds 42,000. It is like building the Sydney Football Stadium in Orange. One of FIFA's rules for hosting a World Cup is that the host must have 10 stadiums that can hold at least 40,000. So they built a massive new grandstand around an existing sports field, said "And that makes ten" to FIFA, and it's unlikely they will ever fill it again. The only people who live there are in ramshackle huts and they could have been put into decent homes for the cost of that grandstand.

What is amazing to see, though, it how many Australians have made the journey. This is a tough place to get to, and many buses have driven 10 hours from Durban, and will drive straight back after the game. It is a fantastic tribute to the willingness of Australians to spend a heap of money and follow their team, with great enthusiasm and optimism.

I meet up with Glenn McDowell, a long-time market colleague who is staying in Joburg with a few friends. We share a beer in an area filled with Aussies consuming vast quantities of alcohol before the game, then carrying four bottles on Budweiser each into the match to drink before half time.

As soon as the line up is announced, I feel we are going to win. Kewell in, Bresciano in, no Garcia. Immediately on kick-off, the team looks lively and is moving well, and we score early. The crowd goes nuts: it's a massive beer shower, and everyone is really up for it. For 10 minutes, this is what we came for.

Then the Kewell hand ball. These incidents can be over-analysed. Was it, wasn't it. It was one of those incidents that could have gone either way, the referee may have waved it away and we'd have forgotten about it. But the moment he gave a hand ball, Kewell had to go off. It's not possible under the laws of the game to give a penalty and not also a dismissal.

From my vantage point above the corner flag at the end where it happened, I thought Kewell made a more deliberate move to block the ball than the TV replays show. It was a proper movement to the ball, not accidental. I wasn't sure at the time whether it hit his arm or shoulder, but on replay it is clearly his upper arm. So although I was devastated, and it was a tough call, it was probably correct.

Gutted, I really thought Kewell would have a good World Cup, and he looked lively while he was on. If we could have had Kewell and Cahill on the field at the same time, we had a good chance of beating Serbia.

We held on bravely, played with a lot of heart, one of the best games I've seen from Lucas Neill. Luke Wilkshire will have to live with his easy miss that would have won the game, and made Rustenburg an historic occasion for Australian football, rather than another near thing. We could all have talked about the day we trudged out to this field in Africa and watched a 10 man team fight the odds, much like we talk about Kaiserslautern in Germany 2006. It was an "I was there" moment. That would have been wonderful, but Wilkshire hit a poor shot right at the keeper. And that was it.

So glum-faced, or completely pissed in the case of a few hundred of the lads, we dragged our feet out of the stadium, and in no mood other than to lie down and forget about it, we had to find our coach. When we had arrived in bright sunlight five hours earlier, ours were the first buses in the nearby field. By the time I found the correct exit from the ground, itself a navigation feat that would have made Christopher Columbus proud, and eventually located the field where the bus had left us, there were a hundred buses there, all with engines running, spewing out a surreal cloud of diesel fumes. Heaven knows what I would have done if the buses had left and I'd been left in that hell-hole with no transport system, hardly any houses, and a Nigerian still looking out for me. Eventually, I found one of our buses bound for Joburg airport, and we joined a massive traffic jam working its way along the one lane road out of the town.

Four hours later and one hour after the flight was due to leave, we reached the airport. Fortunately, our tour company had booked the entire plane out, so it was held up for us. We simply piled onto it and sat anywhere. Twenty hours after leaving, we arrived back at our hotel.

Football mirrors life, and just like life, has its great rewards and disappointments. It is not always fair and just, and the margin between success and failure can be fine. But it is the lost opportunities of Rustenburg which make the thrills of Kaiserslautern all the more amazing. Is it worth trekking 20 hours to a field in some way off province to be showered in beer? You bet it is.