End of the World, nearly, for England (News Feature)

By Barry Whelan Dec 3, 2010, 12:19 GMT

Berlin - There was shock and there was horror, there was a little bit of stiff upper lip - and a slight dash of humour.

England not only failed to persuade FIFA to give it the 2018 World Cup. In fact, it was much worse. The English boys - Prince William, David Beckham, David Cameron et all - took a hell of a beating, to quote the late Norwegian football commentator Bjorge Lillelien.

Or as the Mirror put it: 'SOLD - Football isn't coming home.'

That was, perhaps, one of the milder comments by the British media Friday after the England 2018 World Cup bid team left Zurich beaten and bruised, comprehensively knocked out in the first round.

The sum of all its heroic efforts - the years of lobbying and kowtowing, the royalty and the glamour, not to mention a 3-million-pound technical report: a paltry two votes, one of them its own.

Where did it all go wrong?

The first instinct was to blame the dastardly British media. After all, reports of alleged corruption within football's world governing body was unlikely to have helped England's cause.

Japan's FIFA executive committee member Junji Ogura confirmed all the worse fears by telling the BBC Friday the media reports may well be the reason for England's humiliation.

'I thought England was a very strong candidate. Their presentation was one of the best presentations,' he said.

'But I think there was a big influence from the BBC and the Sunday Times. These reports possibly influenced people. It made damage for some people.'

But the dastardly - others might say intrepid - British media was having none of that. The vote for Russia - and Qatar for 2022 - was, some said, an almighty fix and the bidding process an almighty con.

'FIFA bungs Russia the World Cup,' said Sun, the tabloid daily also discovering that the Russian bid team told the England bid team the day before that they would win the 2018 race.

For the Mail, skulduggery was definitely lurking not far from the surface in what it called 'The Great Zurich Stitch-up.'

The Mirror meanwhile said that those people who criticised the British media for exposing alleged FIFA corruption should be ashamed of themselves. The votes for Russia and Qatar were 'victories for good old-fashioned venality.'

'What cost us the tournament in the end was not that we said too much. It was that we didn't say enough,' it wrote.

The anger was not confined to the popular tabloids. In more tentative appraisals, the leftwing liberal Guardian said, 'FIFA sticks together and damns the British media,' while the Independent noted, 'The surprise must be that anyone is surprised.'

The vote was 'far from the international game's finest moment,' it remarked, and suggested that the fact that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin absented himself from the announcement could even have been a sign 'he knew that the Cup was in the bag all along.'

Prime Minister Cameron - who was in Zurich - has now been given 'a lesson in the brutal realities of FIFA,' a commentator said.

Former England manager Terry Venables, writing in the Sun, said it was hardly surprising the vote went to Russia because 'after all, FIFA and the KGB are just about the last two secret organisations on the planet.'

Sour grapes, us? Well, a British a sense of humour did not entirely desert the English in their darkest Zurich hours.

'Cheer up Becks, at least England didn't go out on penalties,' wrote the Guardian.

And Cameron, after the initial shock and disappointment, managed to keep some of his pecker up, according to the Daily Telegraph with the following conversation between prince and prime minister.

'I met Prince William coming out of one of these meetings and said, 'how did it go?' He said it had gone really, really well. I said, 'gosh how did you do it, what did you offer him? An invitation to the wedding?' He said, 'Prime Minister, I went so far I think I offered to marry him'.'

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