Though we would hate to admit it, there’s something rather comforting about a defeat that we didn’t deserve. It’s what the English do best. We are the experts of refusing to bend the rules, losing in heartbreaking fashion and then extolling the virtues of the stiff upper lip. “We’re English. We don’t do upset.”
And we’re terrible winners too. Just ask the Germans. We’re such terrible winners that one World Cup (and two world wars – doodah) forced them to compel us to 30 years of unrelenting, humiliating defeats whenever we met. They even became so good at beating us, that they found a new, more crushing way of destroying our collective spirits – via the penalty shoot out. And then when they were done beating us on the football field, the Deutsche Mark became more valuable than the Pound, and then they beat us in the vote to host the 2006 World Cup.
But the Germans weren’t here today. With the Germans out of the way, this was meant to be our hour. Despite Lord Triesman, several expensive handbags (both literal and metaphorical), the BBC and the Sunday Times, we’d somehow managed to seemingly clinch victory from the jaws of defeat. Prince William had been called in to show that some diplomatic tact and skill had come from the genes of Prince Phillip. Call me Dave had expended huge amounts of energy into his personal efforts to win England the right to host the 2018 event, and had even had time to pop back to London briefly on Wednesday to insult Ed Miliband. And David Beckham was being, well, David Beckham. Which is usually enough. And we had Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer. If anyone knows how to win a close contest in the dying moments, its surely a pair of goalscoring legends who’d played for the likes of, er, Spurs. And Newcastle. (Note to Ed: scrap that last one)
Channel 4 had reported that the key player in England’s hopes, Jack Warner, had assured members of the English bid that ‘it’s in the bag’. We didn’t realise he meant a bodybag. We didn’t just lose, but we came fourth out of four, thanks probably to tactical voting. The Belgium/Holland bid won four votes in the first round to knock England out, but two of those voters then switched to Russia in the next round, which raised eyebrows. But it is a legal move, albeit unsporting, and one England would probably have taken themselves. But if we’d had the votes of the US, Trinidad & Tobago & Guatemala, as we thought we had, then it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
There will now be a post mortem, another peculiarly English phenomenon. Only here do we feel such an unrelenting need to dissect every minute failure in such graphic detail. Everyone knows we had a great bid. The presentations were sensational, and the campaign team did an excellent job. Russia simply did a better job. FIFA will come under scrutiny for its voting process, and the allegations against two of its Executive Committee that they were willing to take bribes for their vote will only make that attention more intense. FIFA does have some serious questions to answer. Its voting process is a shambles. But to level accusations at Russia would be poor. Once England were knocked out, Russia were probably the most deserving of the other three contenders, and are deserved hosts. England shouldn’t feel ashamed at losing to the competitors they were up against, but should instead be asking questions about the 2022 bid.
The question must be posed to FIFA – how can Qatar, whose passion for football is about equal to the average person’s lust for violent and unpredictable pain to be unleashed on them, win the right to host a World Cup when the likes of England, Holland/Belgium and Spain/Portugal are disappointed again? They will say that Qatar is ‘new land’ and a new corner of the world, but it’s not as if the country is living in some kind of cave, separate from the world. If they liked football, they wouldn’t need a World Cup to bring that out. The Dutch love football, yet they have never hosted the competition. Indeed the Dutch have given football some of the world’s greatest football memories. Yet they, along with England, Spain, Belgium and Portugal, have missed out. Countries where millions are obsessed by the game, so that FIFA can go and fail to win over the favour of the Qatari public. It didn’t work in the USA, and they were far more interested in the sport than Qatar are now.
England’s bid today was genuinely the best bid on display. David Cameron pointed that out in the aftermath of the result. If only it were that simple. If it were, we’d win the right to host the tournament every time. But then, how boring would it be if the biggest, most profitable, established and developed nations won the right to host the tournament? How dull would football be as a game if it was always the favourite who won? It can only be good for the game that a Russia will win every now and again. The truly worrying thing, is when a country that doesn’t care about the game, such as Qatar, can host the greatest football tournament on earth.
