Another Euro pipe dream

In a couple of months, the grass will be laid on the pitch, 80 percent of the commercial space at the venue is already rented out, and the first match will be played there fully three years before Europe’s top footballers are due in. Sounds like the kind of country where the football authorities know what they are doing, doesn’t it?
We mention this purely because we’ve waited and waited but still nobody with an official title has come out and admitted that the FAI’s interest in co-hosting the European soccer championships in 2012 is a particularly unfunny joke. This has to be a silly-season attempt at humor, right? Not even the denizens of Merrion Square — an office bearing only a passing relationship with common sense and logic at the best of times — can be taking this one seriously. But no, apparently, they are.
“We are looking at the possibility of staging the tournament,” FAI chief executive Fran Rooney said last week. “We will, of course, have to formally approach the Scottish FA once more, with only one stadium at our proposal, a revamped Lansdowne Road.”
By all accounts, Rooney has already discussed the prospect of another risibile Scottish-Irish bid with UEFA President Lennart Johanssen and Chief Executive Lars Christer Olsen, as well as Sports Minister John O’Donoghue. And he is still gung-ho. Fantastic stuff. Just when we figured the FAI was finally being run by somebody with serious business sense, the kind of character who would be above carpeting the floors of Orlando hotel rooms with dollar bills like some previous regimes, this comes along to shatter our new-found confidence.
Best to refresh everybody’s memory then about how badly the last Scottish-Irish bid to host the European championships fared. Despite the best efforts of the, ahem, sports-mad Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and some Irish reporters getting all hysterically optimistic about our chances hours before the crucial vote, the FAI-SFA initiative didn’t even make the final three bids under consideration. They were beaten out the gate by Switzerland-Austria, Hungary and Greece-Turkey (two nations that don’t exactly get on at the best of times).
“You have to question the role of the fans, or lack of it,” FAI president Milo Corcoran said of UEFA’s perceived failure to take into account the ridiculous notion that Ireland has the best fans in the world that December day in 2002. “We could have offered half-a-million seats more than any other candidate and really had a party.”
Well, since the FAI are back on the party trail, it behooves us to point out that the Swiss and Austrians, winners of the Euro 2008 stakes, have spent the last 19 months discovering a fundamental truth about bidding to host any major sporting event. So the saying goes, the only thing worse than losing is winning, because then you have to deliver on all the promises made. The Wankdorf Stadium may be the envy of environmentalists the world over, but there have been problems at other venues.
Following issues with the financing, it took the intervention of controversial right-wing politician Jorge Haider to rescue the stadium project in the Austrian town of Klagenfurt. No sooner had building of the 32,000 seater scheduled to host three games there got back on track, though, than an ongoing difficulty with planning permission for the proposed Zurich stadium prompted talk that UEFA might actually think about taking the championships away from the Swiss and Austrians.
But these kind of obstacles emerge all the time when countries are building stadiums to host an event like this. This is why it is such a huge undertaking and so utterly ridiculous for the FAI to be getting involved in another pathetic bid that is bound to fail. Perhaps nothing sums up how badly the last Scots-Irish attempt did than this. UEFA awarded the tournament to the Austro-Swiss conglomerate even though the Swiss FA openly admitted around the time that Bertie Ahern was proudly showing European officials around Dublin that their dream of a new Zurich stadium might be foiled by bureaucracy.
To this end, it’s heartening to see the Scots have reacted coolly to Rooney’s 2012 ambitions. They’ve even gone as far as to remind the FAI that they have plenty of other options in terms of potential bidding partners. We can only hope that this is enough to dismay everybody involved. Certainly, anybody who cares about the game in this country should remind every FAI blazer of the folly of wasting more money that should be pumped into the grass-roots on wining and dining potential UEFA voters.
Two years away from the meeting that will eventually decide who hosts Euro 2012, the field is already filling up with candidates bringing far more to the party than a revamped Lansdowne Road (wouldn’t bet on that being built by 2012 either). Just the other day, in a move remarkably similar to the sort of cold shoulder the Scots are giving the FAI, Ukraine announced its discontent with erstwhile bidding partner Poland.
“The football federation of Poland has done nothing to improve its facilities,” said Grigory Surkis, the president of the Ukrainian Football Federation last Friday. “Poland’s lack of initiative may force us to change partner. Now we are looking to see if can invite another neighboring country, Russia, which already has a developed soccer infrastructure. This can seriously raise our chances.”
Sounds exactly like how the Scots are thinking. Thank God.