BRASILIA: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff took a swipe at the naysayers yesterday as she officially inaugurated the last of six stadiums that Brazil will use next month to host a warm-up for the 2014 World Cup football tournament.
“The pessimists said the stadiums would not be ready in time, but we are showing them today that we can deliver high-quality stadiums,” Rousseff said in a speech in Recife before opening the 46,000-seat Arena Pernambuco outside the northeastern Brazilian city.
Rousseff said Brazil is fulfilling its commitments with global soccer body FIFA, whose secretary general Jerome Valcke last year angered Brazilians by saying the country needed a “kick up the backside” to get World Cup preparations moving.
On Saturday, Rousseff kicked the first symbolic ball on the newly-laid pitch of the brand new Mane Garrincha National Stadium in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, where Brazil will face Japan in the first game of the eight-nation Confederations Cup on June 15.
At a cost 1.2bn reais ($590.1m), the colonnaded stadium is the most expensive of the 12 that Brazil is building for next year’s 32-nation World Cup, and a prime candidate to become a white elephant in a city with no major soccer club. Yet some of its 309 toilets were not ready yet and flooded during a test game between two local teams that filled half the 71,000-seat stadium. Its big test will come on May 26, when two of Brazil’s top teams - Flamengo and Santos - will fill the venue for the opening of the Brazilian national league.
“These six stadiums show the ability and determination we have building the six remaining stadiums,” Rousseff said on Saturday.
Only two stadiums were completed in time for the December deadline originally set by FIFA, which takes over the first batch of stadiums on Tuesday.
FIFA has said it will not budge on the deadline for the second batch of stadiums due by the end of this year. The main problem will be the Sao Paulo stadium where the World Cup is due to kick off in June 2014. Builders threatened to halt construction because of a financing dispute that might throw Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup into disarray and embarrass the government.
Meanwhile, Jose Mourinho looks set to be welcomed back to Chelsea with open arms, but his reputation has been sullied during his three-year stint at Real Madrid and he will return to Stamford Bridge with several thorny issues to address.
Having been released from his contract by Madrid, the charismatic but controversial Portuguese is now widely expected to return to Chelsea, with some British bookmakers offering odds of 20/1 on that he does so.
Chelsea’s fans have already made their feelings known about the prospect of his return, having lustily chanted his name on several occasions during the final weeks of the season.
His previous stint at the club, between 2004 and 2007, saw Chelsea emerge as the dominant force in English football and even their recent continental successes carried echoes of his impact.
Seven different managers will have been and gone by the end of the campaign, but the Europa League winners remain very much a Mourinho team -- dogged, compact, and still bossed by Mourinho loyalists such as Petr Cech, Frank Lampard and captain John Terry. Agencies
