Russians

It is hard not to look like the loser in a beauty contest crying "it's not fair, I'm the prettiest" but the outcome of the draw for the country to host 2018 World Cup has been fairly hard to take.

The contest looks at a number of areas (security, infrastructure, stadia, hotel accommodation, training facilities etc) and then reports are produced by FIFA. By all accounts our reports were very good with the FIFA President, Sepp Blatter, allegedly saying that we were ready to host the tournament "tomorrow".

Yesterday each bidding nation had to make a presentation to the jury and again ours was seen as the best.

As we all now know the 2018 World Cup was awarded to the Russians and the main reason appears to be that their hosting it will leave the biggest legacy, which is one of FIFA's stated aims in awarding tournament. Does that mean that as we invented the game and have most of the country playing the game and have the best league in the world (?) that actually we couldn't leave a legacy? Our presentation in fact addressed that issue by talking about how we would use the competition to work alongside unemployed and disadvantaged people and use football to help them, but that was obviously not what FIFA see as a legacy.

We needed 12 votes to win from 22 delegates, we got 2. Frankly that feels like Eurovision does!

While the Sunday Times article and BBC Panorama programme (who both alleged bribery or corruption amongst the FIFA board)  may have annoyed or offended some of the delegates, 2 votes show that it appears we were never ever a serious candidate as we were never going to leave a legacy similar to that that Russia and Qatar (who were awarded the  2022 competition|) could easily demonstrate.

The depressing truth is that I can't ever seeing us hosting the World Cup again in my life time and it could be 100 years after the last time that  we did do it, before we might get the chance again if this experience is anything to go by.