Qatar still a work in progress for World Cup

DOHA • For years, Qatari organisers have promised to deliver what they had proposed when bidding for the rights to host this year's World Cup: new stadiums, new hotels, new cooling technologies, a new frontier for football.

How did that glimpse into the future look this week? Both reassuring and incomplete, depending on one's perspective.

Over eight days, Qatar hosted three inter-continental play-off games that determined the final two teams for this year's World Cup: Australia and Costa Rica.

Like so many of the marquee events hosted in Doha in recent years, the matches were a chance for Qatar to test drive its facilities, its infrastructure and its tolerance for all the disparate guests.

Five months from the World Cup's opening match, Qatar appears to have gotten the big things right. Seven of the eight air-conditioned stadiums built or refurbished for the World Cup have hosted matches, and the largest (and last) will have its first test events in the coming months.

All but one of the arenas are reachable by one of the three gleaming new subway lines that speed under and through the capital, and work continues on office towers, apartment blocks, roads and sidewalks every day.

Even with so much ready to go, though, to see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a place that is a work in progress rather than a completed vision.

Peru brought the most fans of any country playing this week, a raucous army more than 10,000, but every morning it was possible to walk long city blocks without seeing a soul. In the summer's heat, many residents and visitors emerged only in the evening to sip coffees, stroll the parks and green spaces and to wander the Souk Waqif, the capital's rebuilt marketplace.

But even as the locals, the Qatari families and South Asian workers, pulled out their phones to snap photos and record videos of those fans enjoying this place they probably never thought they would visit, one could not help but feel that none of them could yet be sure what November would bring.

Organisers expect that more than a million fans overall will enter Qatar during the World Cup - 32 cheering sections, just like Peru's, but neutrals, too, all of them crowding the same spaces, competing for the same hotels and cafe tables, all waving their own colours and carrying their own hopes.

Questions persist about where all those guests will sleep, eat, shop and drink. Cruise ships and tent camps may help with that first problem, which remains the biggest unanswered question for fans and organisers.

There are still a few months to sort out the final details, to find the room and rent the buses and the boats, for Qatar to produce the smooth-running showpiece it promised, to flex all that shiny new soft power.

The heat?

That is so low on Qatar's list of concerns that officials and engineers now dismiss it with the wave of a hand. Anyone who has spent time in the Gulf in the winter, they will tell you, knows the mercury drops to about 26 deg C by then, and it is cooler at night. Could that lower the temperature, literally and figuratively, in the fan zones and elsewhere? Maybe.

On game days it will not have to. The stadium air-conditioning systems functioned as advertised all week; on Monday, during Australia's shoot-out win over Peru, blowers and vents built into the 40,000-seat Al Rayyan Stadium cooled the match to a comfortable 22 deg C, even though it was still well over 32 deg C outside.

In a few months, the last and most elaborate system built into the 80,000-seat showpiece stadium in Lusail, which will host 10 matches, including the final, will get its final tests. The engineer who designed it promised this week that it would work. He had, he noted with a laugh, done the calculations himself.

NYTIMES