Even with the big guns of David Beckham, the heir to the throne and the Prime Minister, England could still not land the World Cup in 2018 which has been awarded to Russia and the 2022 Championship to Qatar.
Despite the very real chance that i could end up in the Tower, i was not in favour of us staging it so i am quite happy to see them excitedly jumping around in snowy Moscow after the announcement.
It seems to give it more of a special feeling if the games are at stupid o'clock and you find yourself watching England play Slovakia as you are eating your meusli and wiping the sleepy dust from your eyes.
The fact that our bid got knocked out at the first hurdle with only 2 votes out of 22 shows that we never had much of a chance anyway and the dissection of why we did so badly will now commence.
We have the stadiums already built and an England World Cup would have generated more income for FIFA than any of the other bids so they are not reasons we failed so completely.
The BBC programme showing 4 members of the voting panel were taking backhanders wouldn't have done much to endear them to the English and our badmouthing of the other bids made us look very arrogant and that seems to be our problem.
We do seem to have this attitude that we SHOULD get it just because we are English and if it wasn't for us inventing it, football wouldn't even exist. We based our whole 2006 bid last time on 'football coming home' but instead it went to Germany.
The Qatar decision seems very bizarre but congratulations to Russia and as Moscow is only 3 hours ahead of us, there won't be any early morning games so that gives me the while morning to work up a migraine to get off home to watch the games. Greatski.
4 comments:
Cheers up, Lucy. 2018 and 2022 may not eventuate.
Morons with nukes are everywhere. It only takes one accident, one fanatic.
And which country has the most fanatics? Well, there's America, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan...
Whoops. Clumsy threadjack alert.
As for the contents of your post, Lucy, I was one of the people saying that the BBC were absolutely right to show that Panorama documentary when it did.
The first point to make is that a serious news organisation shouldn't let other agendas or institutions (like the FA, or the government) deflect them from pursuing timely and important stories, which this obviously was.
And I'm not being hypothetical of course. This actually happened to the BBC in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Right wing revisionists like to portray the Beeb as some traitorous lefty organisation, part of the mythical 'liberal media' that they like to imagine exists.
In actual fact, the BBC was among the worst offenders of news organisations around the world (almost up there with the likes of Fox News in the US) in NOT letting anti-war voices onto the screens, to give the case against invading.
The smart money is says that one of Nu Labour's authoritarian henchmen (Alastair Campbell maybe?) leaned on them to make sure they towed the line, ensuring that public opinion didn't go TOO badly against the invasion (which was only really partially achieved, I reckon).
This is a roundabout way of saying that the media loses all credibility when it lets government officials influence what story they run and when. The BBC did not let this happen in this instance, and for that they should be applauded.
Here's a key question: Do you think journalists in Russia have a similar right to publish stories that might have a detrimental effect on something the Russian government values? Of course not.
They may have won the World Cup, but I know where I'd rather live... There are much larger issues than sport here.
Aside from all that, the bottom line is that Panorama fronted up with the truth. FIFA is a totally corrupt organisation. And now that's more obvious than ever. Good.
Judging by how bad England have been doing the last few years it was the only chance we had of being at the 2018 world cup. Im with Cheezy that if the BBC had the proof then they had the moral duty to report it. Hate the idea that we should have kept quiet just because we wanted to win the bid. Let Russia spend billions on it i say.
John Sergeant made the best statement on Question Time when he said that if they hadn't have broadcast it for fear of scuppering our chances in the bid, then we are complicit in any corruption we think there may be. I would rather we exposed it and lost than keep quiet and win because then we have not scarificed our morals.
Turns out we lost which is what i wanted anyway. I do expect a campaign waged by the Sun for the World Cup to be shown on Sky Sports now though to punish the BBC.
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