“Hush little baby, don’t you cry
You know you’re born, you know you die;
Hush little baby don’t you cry,
The whole of life’s your lullaby...”
From Band Baaja
by Bachchoo

“Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury arrive in Smyrna on a specially commissioned ship of the Royal Navy to plead with the Federation of International Fencing Associations (Fifa) to hold the 1894 international sword fencing tournament in Tunbridge Wells where a municipal park has been set aside for the express purpose and several commercial and charitable ladies’ organisations of a certain class will provide cream teas to the participants and guests.”
From the Times December 11, 1890...
All lies, yaar, there was no such items in the then Times. I made it up for contrast reasons. Why I did? I will tell:
Last week Prince William, heir to the British throne, and David Cameron, Prime Minister, flew to Switzerland to support the United Kingdom’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup in London. Others went with them, notably David Beckham, a famous footballer, all to plead with a group of international representatives of football-playing countries gathered under the delegated aegis of the Federation of International Football Associations.
The Prince spoke, the Prime Minister told the international electoral college of football-playing nations what great facilities Britain would provide, how it was a nation which had invented football (disquiet from the Pakistani delegation) and how the game was written into the DNA of every Briton, black, white and khaki.
Cut no ice, no dice. The UK got two of the votes of the international delegations. Russia, whose Prime Minister Vladimir Putin didn’t bother to attend this earth-shattering selection ceremony because he had better things to do and said he “didn’t want to put pressure on the Fifa vote by his presence”, won the vote. The football World Cup in 2018 will be held in Russia.
A second vote was held to give the World Cup for 2022 and the vote went to Qatar.
The Russian delegation gave each other bear hugs, the Qatar delegation toasted each other with coconut water and went home jubilant.
Prince William and Mr Cameron returned to London despondent and the British media scratched its head and began to publicly ask “what went wrong?” The Prince and the haughty Prime Minister return with egg on faces and tomato blotches on Imperial costumes. The Cheshire Cat, the Walrus, the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse begin to tell us what’s wrong, corrupt and venal about an ungrateful world.
The old Roman proverb might have been “When bread is scarce bring on the circuses”, but throwing Christians to the lions and having gladiators slaughter each other in the arena was never a substitute for Imperial conquest or a compensation for it not happening.
Caesar might have enjoyed the Games, but he didn’t go around begging the Gauls, Goths, Huns and Angles to allow him to stage them.
There ought not to be as much bewilderment in Britain about the rejection of the sceptred isle as a venue for the spectacle eight years away.
The British newspapers were part of an international newspaper expose of corruption within Fifa, accusing a few of its voting delegates of negotiating bribes for the sale of their votes. Fifa could, of course, have extended profound thanks to the British media for exposing corruption in its ranks, rooted out the corrupt delegates, made sure that the rest were sound and would vote only on the basis of the merits of the bid and then in gratitude for calling attention to its corrupt procedures awarded the prize to the UK. But Johnny Foreigner is ungrateful if he is anything and obviously the delegates of Fifa didn’t react in this noble way.
They may even have thought the British a trifle naive to believe that the award was granted on the merits of the presentation and the strength of Britain’s facilities as host to an international sporting event. The world, as represented by Fifa or even by the United Nations General Assembly, doesn’t work that way.
The game being played is certainly not cricket and is as sporting as the trading of horse-flesh.
It may, of course, be that the entire system of voting depends on who buys the most votes — I only pose this as a possibility as I have no evidence that apart from the provision of junkets to the closed club of delegates any material benefits change hands. The choice of Qatar in 2022, a territory which has a small land mass, a small population but a sizeable amount of petro-dollars, is vaguely puzzling until one considers that money can buy facilities and any child knows that winning the gratitude of rich people may be at some point beneficial.
A World Cup event, for which the stadiums and facilities are already built, should be, apart from the prestige it brings, a money-spinner for the host country. Britain doesn’t yet know whether the billions spent on the Olympics which will be held in London in 2012 will be recovered even in future years. We know that the infrastructure of a relatively depressed part of London has received a boost from the construction and expenditure around the event and the Mayor of London and others are reckoning the value of the Olympics in measures other than pounds and pence. Fair enough.
They are also treating the holding of the Olympics as an assertion of Britain’s pre-eminence in the world, a sort of compensation prize for losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Somewhere in the psyche of Britain, a world event which focuses on the country is also an indefinable consolation for the loss of Empire. Queen Victoria and Lord Salisbury or Disraeli would not have had to petition delegates. They would have commanded the games to be held in London, probably in perpetuity.
What is touching about the defeat of the British bid is the jejune faith in facts, figures and the strength of the arguments displayed by the committee that put it together and presented it — Prime Minister, heir to the throne, David Beckham and all. They should not have asked themselves what Britain can do for football, but asked only what they could do for Fifa.