When World Cup officials on a tour of South Africa's showpiece venues arrived at the ground on Sunday, they were confronted with a brown sandpit colonised by dozens of birds.
They now face a race against time to get the stadium ready for the first game between Honduras and Chile on June 16. Australia is due to play Serbia there in its third group match on June 23, after Italy and New Zealand meet at the venue.
There is local speculation that another pitch failure could force FIFA to switch the fixtures to a different venue.
Conflicting official explanations of what has gone wrong served only to sow confusion on a tour of nine cities. Ronnie Moyo, a 2010 marketing and events manager who gave a guided tour of the Mbombela Stadium, said the original pitch was removed in December after failing a FIFA inspection because ''25 per cent of the pitch had clay soil''. ''In January we put in some Norwegian grass and realised it was no good,'' he added.
''So the third one will go back to the original. We're starting tomorrow and it should only take two weeks.''
Asked how the blunders happened, he replied: ''When you put people under one roof they tend to recommend different things.''
But later a different version of events claimed there had been only one failure so far. Richard Hayden, a FIFA pitch consultant, said: ''The decision was made that the pitch was potentially very good but the extra 15 to 20 per cent [in quality] was not there.
''We're about to start reseeding and in about four weeks it will be green. In seven or eight weeks you will have a state-of-the-art pitch.''
Asked to resolve the discrepancies between accounts, Danny Jordaan, the chief executive of the World Cup organising committee, said: ''I should advise you to use information from the specialist, not what you heard in the corridor. Who do you believe, a heart surgeon or a tour guide?''
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