Charles Apple

The South African national soccer team — called Bafana Bafana, which means the Boys, the Boys — today lost in its second game of the World Cup.

Bafana was crushed by Uruguay, 3-0. Which, given the 1-1 draw with Mexico in Friday’s opening match, doesn’t bode well for its chances to advance out of “group play” into the “round of 16,” which begins June 26. If it wishes to keep from being the first-ever host team to be eliminated in the first round of a World Cup, South Africa absolutely must beat France on June 22.

France, of course, had played Uruguay to a 0-0 tie on opening day. So it’s not looking good.

Despite all this, the daily newspapers with which I worked during my time in South Africa last year did a great job of presenting the loss to Afrikaans-speaking readers in Thursday’s paper.

Here is Johannesburg’s Beeld, courtesy of A1 designer Andries Gouws (click for a larger view):

Nightmare!, the headline says. Bafana furious over red card — referring to a penalty on South Africa’s goaltender that forced the team to play a man short for the rest of the match.

Andres played the photo of the red card being awarded — shot by Reuters’ Alessandro Bianchi — nice and big. Across the top of the package is a timeline of the game’s major events, to which Andres committed early in the evening. He worked on it as the game progressed.

Andres writes:

Well, Bafana’s changes of commencing to the next stage is even worse now.

But it’s been an exciting night at work! I didn’t expect my timeline to turn out so dramatic in the last part of the second half.

Later tonight, Andres sent me another version:

Andries writes:

For the final edition, we went back to the nameplate we usually use.  There was a feeling that the colours of the flag in the nameplate make  things just too busy at the top of the page. I’m not sure which one works  best — I haven’t seen the fronts in print yet.

I also made the last fifteen minutes on the timeline solid red. A time of crisis, hehe.

The early and late editions, compared:

Hmm. I think Andries has a good point about the nameplate. I love the special one, but it doesn’t work with the timeline up there, does it? Another option might have been to move the timeline down below the story and the two photos, above the ad.

Either way, I think Andries served the fine readers of Johannesburg very well tonight.

Meanwhile, across the country in the Mother City of Cape Town, here is the front page of Thursday’s die Burger (again, click for a larger view):

South Africa hanging by a thread, the headline says. Various photos show the match’s three goals. Two of the shots are from Reuters; one is from AP.

The story downpage is about churches having to set up tents after floods. You have to remember: It’s winter in South Africa. It’s been very cold in Cape Town the past few days.

Here is the sports front for Thursday’s Beeld:

Shame at Loftus! the headline screams — Loftus being the name of the stadium in Pretoria where the match was played Wednesday. It happens to be the home of the rugby champion Blue Bulls.

Here is an inside page of Thursday’s paper:

Andries explains:

On the left: Springbok rugby players cheering earlier in the game. On the right: Dejected fans after the game.

Springboks are the national rugby team. Composed of a bunch of Blue Bulls, in fact. It all gets very confusing for both rugby and soccer, with club leagues and national teams and Olympic national teams. It’s like the world’s largest Venn diagram, but the pieces are constantly moving around.

In addition, Andries sent me this inside page of Wednesday’s Beeld, previewing the match (again, click for a larger view):

And Arlene Prinsloo — the design guru for the entire Media24 newspaper chain and design director of die Burger in Cape Town — sent me this graphic by Jaco Grobbelaar that previewed the match in the pages of the sports section:

This piece ran five columns wide. Of course, click it for a larger view.

We’ll look at a few more South African pages in a few minutes. First, a look at some front pages from around the world…

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TUESDAY FRONT PAGES

The Netherlands defeated Denmark 2-0 on Monday, resulting in this colorful celebratory front page by Algemeen Dagblad of Rotterdam:

In case you’re wondering: Yes, the nameplate is always orange. They didn’t turn it orange for the win.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, Politiken of Copenhagen focused on an injured player:

In the day’s final match, Italy tied Paraguay 1-1 — the fourth tie in 11 games to that point. Not being a soccer fan myself, I have to wonder: Geez, does this happen a lot?

Anyway, perhaps because of the tie, Italian papers played the story out front Tuesday. But not very large:

See? That’s basically two-column lead art in Rome’s la Repubblica. And no other Italian paper I could find Tuesday did much better:

From left to right:

• La Nuova of Ferrara
• La Stampa of Torino
• Il Piccolo of Trieste
• Messaggero Veneto of Udine

If you’re going to use your lead art this small, I’d suggest you’re using the wrong art. Find something more dynamic or something you can justify using larger. If your biggest photo is only two columns wide, then you’re doing it wrong.

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WEDNESDAY FRONT PAGES

The first match on Wednesday was — you guessed it — a 1-1 tie between Slovakia and New Zealand. The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, used the same approach that many American papers did last Sunday:

A draw that feels like a win. One wonders if every draw feels like a win. Perhaps this is a reason why the typical American dislikes soccer so much. Americans hate ties. They add extra innings to baseball games and “sudden death” to football games to avoid draws.

Tuesday’s second game resulted in — wait for it — a scoreless tie between Portugal and the Ivory Coast. Porto’s Público played the story out front with this very nice picture:

This front page — of the Jornal de Notícias, also of Porto — summed up the game much better, though. Note the body English Portuguese of the players:

False start, the headline says.

The big game of the day, however, was Brazil’s 2-1 win over North Korea. Man, those Brazilians love their soccer, as you can see from the front pages of their newspapers. Damn near every paper in the country played the story on A1 and nearly all made it their centerpiece.

I’ll show you the best five, starting with this one, Diário do Pará of Belém, Brazil:

Ufa is a city in Russia and a small town in Ethiopia. Somehow, I doubt either is the UFA! referenced in the headline. The photo is by the Associated Press.

I don’t care for the score superimposed over the photo here. But I do like the picture of the Brazilian player leaping over the North Korean goalie:

That is Diário do Alto Tietê of Suzano.

Normally, I suggest folks stay away from montage or multiple photos as lead art. This only works if it’s done very, very well. And Diário Catarinense of Florianópolis did it very well, even including a nice headline:

The headline says: Suffocation + Doubt = Relief.

One thing I’ve not seen in a lot of front page World Cup front pages so far is emotion. I don’t mean a player running around with a dumb grin on his face — I’ve seen quite enough of that. I mean real emotion. If the World Cup is truly the biggest sporting event in the world, that ought to be communicated, somehow, via the photography.

That’s one reason I like that last page so much. All three of those pictures show me emotion.

That’s the case especially with this next one, on the front of Jornal de Santa Catarina in Blumenau. Or is it?

That’s a striker for North Korea, crying as his country’s national anthem is played. This would be before the match, if I’m not mistaken. Until I had run all the cover copy through Google translator, though, I had assumed this was a North Korean player after the match.

Still, it’s a nicely-composed page. The picture is by Stephane de Sakutin of AFP.

Our final Brazilian front of the day also shows great emotion. This is Zero Hora of Porto Alegre, which was less than delighted with the 2-1 victory Brazil pulled out. The headline says: Premiere suffered:

That’s wonderful work by Getty’s Phil Cole.

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TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

Earlier this week, Michael Bird — presentation editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail — sent me a fun “little” piece that I’ve been holding for my next Cup post.

Michael writes:

Outside of the host country, of course, many consider Toronto to be one of the best places on the planet to take in the World Cup since [the city] is so multicultural.

The province of Ontario is allowing licensed bars and restaurants to start serving booze an hour earlier (10 a.m.) for the duration of the tournament.

The Globe and Mail, therefore, capitalized on this opportunity by creating a four-page wrap that shows fans which sports bars they can expect to have their favorite team on the widescreens.

On one side is this giant doubletruck map (click for a larger view):

On the other side is this team-by-team listing, including — for each joint — “the pitch” and “the grub,” where they allowed the folks at the pub itself to cite what they’re doing for Cup fans (this, too, is clickable):

Michael tells us:

The wrap was the brainchild of Craig Offman, our Globe T.O. section editor, and involved graphic journalists Ninian Carter and Tonia Cowan, plus designers David Pratt and David Woodside.

The wrap ran Saturday, the first full day of competition.

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A FEW MORE SOUTH AFRICAN PAGES

I’ve already shown you a number of pages from the papers with which I worked in South Africa last year (here and here and, of course, at the start of today’s post). My friend Arlene Prinsloo — the design director for die Burger in Cape Town and the design coordinator for the Media24 chain — sent me another batch of pages this week.

This one ran Friday, previewing the South Africa vs. Mexico game that opened Cup play:

I showed you that five-column centerpiece graphic already, designed by one of my star “students,” the aforementioned Jaco Grobbelaar. But now you can see how they played his piece on the page.

You might recall that the South African national team tied Mexico 1-1 in that first match last Friday. Which, yes, Bafana fans treated as if it were a win. This was the Saturday sports front of Beeld, the Johannesburg daily:

Here’s an inside page from Monday that shows how the chain is treating games between other teams. This one is an advance for the Italy vs. Paraguay:

Across the bottom are the standings for all five World Cup groupings. I’m not so crazy about the pink tints. But I love the striped bar across the top of the page.

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WORLD CUP FUNNIES

I showed you samples, the other day, of a South African comic strip called Mama Taxi by Deni Brown and Gavin Thomson. The Media24 papers used special, custom-drawn World Cup-themed strips as features front art last week in the buildup to the Cup.

Things have returned to normal for the comic strip — it’s returned to its standard daily strip-like format. But the subject matter is still the Cup and all the hoopla surrounding it.

This was Saturday’s strip (click any of these for a larger view):

Monday’s strip was about the vuvuzela backlash:

And Tuesday’s strip attempted to explain why the Cup is so popular with the ladies:

Find Mama Taxi’s web site here. I received the book I ordered last week of the collected Mama Taxi strips. Buy one for yourself here.

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Are you doing anything interesting for the World Cup? Send me PDFs, please.

Previous World Cup coverage, here in the blog:

• Sunday, June 6: Preparing readers for the World’s Cup
• Monday, June 7: Monday’s World Cup pages
• Wednesday, June 8: World Cup pages from South Africa
• Thursday, June 9: Talking soccer graphics with Konstantinos Antonopoulos
• Thursday, June 9: Tooting horns for the World Cup
• Friday, June 10: Opening day pages
• Saturday, June 11: The front page of Saturday’s Johannesburg paper.
• Saturday, June 11: The most fun I’ve seen yet on a World Cup page.
• Sunday, June 12: U.S. Cup fronts after the tie with England weren’t so gracious.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 8:14 pm and is filed under International newspapers, Sports design, World Cup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.