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Spanish team get heroes' welcome after World Cup triumph
AFP - 2 hours 50 minutes ago
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Spanish team get heroes' welcome after World Cup triumph
MADRID (AFP) - – Spain gave its football team a heroes' welcome on Monday with up to a million people filling the streets for a red and gold fiesta after their World Cup triumph over the Netherlands.
As the South African hosts prided themselves for defying pessimistic predictions, the Spanish squad flew home in a fairytale moment for the country after years of dashed hopes at the tournament.
A huge cheer erupted from a crowd gathered at Madrid airport when keeper Iker Casillas emerged from the team's plane with coach Vicente del Bosque and held aloft the golden trophy.
The squad were to meet Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero before taking an open top bus in a victory parade through the capital, where raucous celebrations were entering their second day.
The party had begun immediately after Barcelona's Andres Iniesta scored the final's only goal late on Sunday, three minutes before the end of extra time after a match watched by an estimated 700 million people worldwide.
"Iniesta Presidente! Iniesta Presidente!" chanted one group of fans as they marched along the centre of the Gran Via, Madrid's main thoroughfare in the early hours.
Zapatero said he had "suffered like never before" as he watched the game in Johannesburg's Soccer City staudium, which gave Spain their first ever World Cup title.
The victory came exactly a week after Spain's Rafael Nadal lifted the Wimbledon tennis trophy and caps a series of major sporting achievements, including a European title for the nation's basketball team.
The victories have brought joy to a country where around 20 percent of the active population is jobless and the economy is forecast to contract by 0.3 percent over 2010 as a whole.
Two people died during the wild celebrations in Spain -- one person fell off a balcony and another drowned in a swimming pool -- and over 100 were injured, local officials said.
In Amsterdam the Dutch team received a warm welcome despite the sombre national mood, their plane escorted by two F-16 fighter jets, one of them painted in the team's signature orange.
A parade along the canals of Amsterdam is planned for Tuesday and a reception with Queen Beatrix -- even if the Dutch won over few neutrals Sunday with a sometimes brutal approach that saw centreback Johnny Heitinga sent off.
"We have to be very proud of the team. They had us in raptures for a month," Crown Prince Willem-Alexander told Dutch television.
The South African government was meanwhile hoping the tournament will bring long-term benefits.
Ever since it became the first African nation to win the right to stage the world's biggest sporting event, South Africa has had to fend off accusations that rampant crime and lack of infrastructure made it an unsuitable choice.
While there were armed robberies of journalists and thefts from team hotels, a massive police deployment helped ensure the nightmare vision of fans being gunned down never materialised.
The crowning glory for the organisers came on Sunday night when South Africa's first black president, the now 91-year-old Nelson Mandela, rode onto the field in a golf cart, bringing rapturous cheers.
President Jacob Zuma said the World Cup brought "priceless" benefits for attracting South Africans of all races into the stands. He said South Africa could now think about staging the Olympics.
But while the World Cup was marked by a show of unity, massive challenges now lurk in a country still struggling to bridge a racial divide some 16 years after the end of apartheid and a gaping chasm between rich and poor.
In a sign of the tensions bubbling below the surface, immigrants fearing anti-foreigner attacks sought refuge in several South African police stations in Cape Town on Monday after looting at the weekend.
"The challenge, now, is to ensure that the infrastructure that has been developed, particularly the transport infrastructure, benefits all South Africans, especially the poor," the Nobel Prize-winning archbishop Desmond Tutu said.
Casting a pall over the celebrations elsewhere were coordinated bomb attacks on crowds watching the World Cup final at two restuarants in the Ugandan capital Kampala which killed 74 people on Sunday night.
Somalia's Al-Qaeda-inspired Shebab militants claimed responsibility for the blasts, saying they were in revenge for Uganda's role in an African Union force protecting the fragile western-backed transitional government in Mogadishu.
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