More than 100,000 FIFA 2010 World Cup tickets were sold in first 24 hours of an over-the-counter sales drive in South Africa, FIFA announced on Friday.

"The demand for tickets within the 2010 FIFA World Cup host country continues to grow as the fifth and last sales phase enters its second day as thousands of football fans queued at the 11 ticketing centers in all host cities and the 600 bank branches nationwide", Horst R. Schmidt, chairman of FIFA's ticketing-sub-committee said in a statement.

He added that FIFA was very pleased with the interest and with the latest figures.

As of noon on Friday, a number of knock-out stage matches including the three round of 16, one quarter final and the third and fourth place play-off, 28 Group games were still available.

"Due to the high demand, a total of 29 matches are currently no longer available (including the final, the two semi-finals and the opening game as well as all games in Durban and Cape Town)."

He said that tickets for these games might still come back into circulation in small quantities to the public sales in the future if corporations declined to take up their full allocations.

On Thursday FIFA released the last 500 000 out of three million World Cup tickets in the fifth and final phase of sales.

This was the first time World Cup tickets have been available for sale over the counter in South Africa. There was chaos at some sales points as computers struggled to cope with the volume of sales.

Late on Friday there were still long queues in Johannesburg and Pretoria.

South Africa will host the World Cup from June 11 to July 11.

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