BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – A British newspaper, the Independent, yesterday launched a caustic attack on FIFA’s high-ranking Trinidadian executive member Jack Warner after football’s world governing body rejected England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup.
Sam Wallace, the newspaper’s football correspondent, accused Warner of promising England the all-important three CONCACAF votes and then failing to deliver during the secret ballot in Zurich.
Warner, a government minister in Trinidad and Tobago, is a powerful FIFA vice-president and is president of CONCACAF, the continental governing body for the North, Central America and Caribbean region. His vote was one of 22 on the executive committee which helped hand Russia the 2018 showpiece and surprisingly award oil-rich Qatar the 2022 event.
In recent weeks, Warner had been courted by England Prime Minister David Cameron; Prince William, the second in line to the British throne and superstar David Beckham, the most recognisable football face in the country.
However, England embarrassingly bowed out in the first round of voting on Thursday securing just two votes, one of which is believed to be the country’s bid chairman Geoff Thompson.
Wallace contended that England’s bid committee should have been wary of engaging Warner especially “given his implication in a 2006 World Cup ticket scandal over which even FIFA was moved to sanction him.”
“But the English bid team thought that they could tame Warner and persuade him to deliver the three CONCACAF votes. By last night they were coming to terms with the scope of their political miscalculation,” Wallace wrote.
“England chased Warner all over the world, sending Fabio Capello’s England team to play Trinidad and Tobago in June 2008 in what turned into a rally for Warner the politician.”
He continued: “They dispatched Beckham to hold a training camp there and the FA’s top brass consented to be lectured and harangued by Warner, a man from an island with virtually no football history, in return for him coming through for them at FIFA House yesterday.
“It will long be regarded as a source of great embarrassment that English football ever took [Warner] seriously but the humiliation he visited on them will never be forgotten.”
That England faltered in the first round came as a huge shock especially since their bid was recently rated as the strongest by FIFA’s technical inspection team.
And while Warner had never openly pledged his support for England, his meetings with the distinguished members of the bid delegation had raised hopes he would side with them during yesterday’s vote.
He was invited to lunch by Cameron late last month and it was reported that he met with Prince Williams and Beckham during the last week.
Only recently, he described the England bid “impressive” but acknowledged that there were very strong proposals from Russia, Spain-Portugal and the Netherlands-Belgium.
“I am still undecided as to whom we will support, but the CONCACAF family will vote together,” Warner was quoted as saying earlier this week.
Wallace said with FIFA’s rejection of the English bid, Warner had given Prime Minister Cameron the ultimate snub.
“Warner delivered a lesson to Britain’s young Prime Minister and its even fresher-faced heir to the throne that there are no politics in international sport more brutal than those of FIFA …,” he wrote.
“Cameron was fortunate that he was out of Zurich and away from the television cameras when Warner delivered his stitch-up of the English bid in which neither he nor his CONCACAF colleagues … voted for England.
“In Cameron’s gilded political career it would be difficult to remember a more blatant humiliation than the one dealt him by Warner.”
England’s two-year campaign to host a World Cup 52 years after they hosted their last, cost an estimated 15 million pounds sterling.
