South Africa stands on the cusp of an unplanned cash injection of R2-billion in the next four months. As the rest of the world reels from the global financial meltdown, cricket's Indian Premier League, the British and Irish Lions rugby tour and Fifa Confederations' Cup will see the equivalent of 1 percent of the country's gross domestic product unleashed in the local economy. In one week, the IPL starts the series of international matches in all the major cities around South Africa. At the end of May, the 10-match British Irish Lions Tour starts at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg followed by the June 14 opening of the Fifa Confederations Cup. Durban will be one of the main beneficiaries of the sporting bonanza. The city's hotels are expected to be fully booked when it stages 16 of the IPL matches and two games of the Lions tour - one against the Sharks and the other a Test against the Springboks in June - and then the Springboks play the All Blacks in a Tri-Nations match in August, all at Absa Stadium. T-Sec economist Mike Schussler said: "Certainly the three major upcoming sporting events will help the country a great deal, especially with growth. Hopefully they will help relieve a bit of the current economic pressure." Early indications are that all the tournaments would do well as tickets for the three British Lions Test matches and the first two IPL matches are already sold out.

The Fifa local organising committee says a massive 70 000 tickets were sold this week alone, amounting to around half of the ticket sales for the Confederations Cup. Andre Homan, SA Rugby project manager for the Lions tour, said that just over 300 000 of the 500 000 tickets had sold. About 22% of the Test tickets were sold internationally. For the IPL, the debut double header match was sold out within two hours of going on sale with the next day's game selling out soon after. South African Tourism's global manager for events Sugen Pillay is also optimistic about the spin-off of these tournaments, saying they would give tourism a massive boost. "It's difficult to quantify how many people will come into the country during these big sporting events," he said. "But what we can say for sure is that the events will bring an added value to our economy." He said if it wasn't for the global financial crisis, the number of people who would come to the events could have been even greater. "Sport for us has become an important tool to drive tourism growth." Pillay said that in 2007 during the Cricket T20 tournament there were about 5 000 Indian fans in the country. He believed it would probably get the same number from India alone or even more for the IPL.