The Sound of the crowd

For those of you who follow this blog and don't know, each blog title is also a song title. Clever huh?

Most of the time I have the subject of the blog first and then fit the song to it. Occasionally though a song title jumps into my head and the blog then writes itself. This is one of the latter type.

Every World Cup game this tournament will sound like a swarm of angry bees are loose near to the effects microphone. The reason for this is a trumpet like instrument, widely available in South Africa called the "vuvuzela". This has led to wide scale debate on whether this is adding to the experience or ruining it. Most comment seems to be against the noise they make. Indeed Bill Turnbull on BBC Breakfast this morning even had a conversation with the sound engineer as to whether the feed from the stadium could have the crowd noise "turned down"? Simple answer – no it can't!

There has been talk of having them banned, but the SA economy is likely to be c$2m better off through sales so that's fairly unlikely. If someone throws one at a player then that could change, but let's hope that doesn't happen.

I actually quite like them; after all during the first England game I didn't hear the entirely inappropriate "Great Escape" at all!