Southampton should be part of England's 2018 World Cup bid (From Daily Echo)

Southampton should be part of England's 2018 World Cup bid

6:44pm Wednesday 2nd December 2009 in

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First published in The Pink, November 28, 2009

LOFTY ambitions are, by their very nature, difficult to achieve.

Even more so, when everyone has had a head start on you.

When the door seems to have been slammed shut in your face, most people would just give up and accept it.

That is exactly why Southampton – the club and the city – should be banging on the door of the FA, trying to virtually kick it down and gatecrash the 2018 World Cup bid.

Looking at the shortlist of 15 cities that submitted their presentations on Thursday, it is not far off criminal that Southampton is not one of them.

Plymouth, Hull, Milton Keynes.

Hardly hotbeds of football are they?

Until five years ago, Milton Keynes didn’t even have it’s own club.

To think that it could now be potentially hosting a match like Germany v Mexico is shocking.

The City Council say they were not given the chance to enter a bid when the first chance came around.

Instead, SEEDA opted for Portsmouth and Milton Keynes.

When declarations of interest had to be made, Southampton Football Club wasn’t far off oblivion, so I can understand that decision, no matter how aggrieved I feel by it.

When the revitalised club went to the council to try and launch a late bid, the FA said they couldn’t let them in after the deadline.

Again, I didn’t like it, but I could understand it.

They had their 16 candidates and this part of the world was, on paper at least, covered.

But now Portsmouth has withdrawn, well, there’s a very different landscape.

The deadline has been chosen by the FA.

There’s nothing to stop them from ‘bending their own rules’ as the leader of Portsmouth City Council, Gerald Vernon-Jackson, put it, and let Southampton put its case forward.

By not hearing Southampton out, the FA are cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Also, it is not as if the city was just incompetent – you can’t launch a bid to host World Cup matches if you don’t have a stadium, and if Saints had gone under before Markus Liebherr took over, where would that leave the city?

Liebherr bought the club just two days before the deadline for applications.

I doubt him and Cortese even knew England was bidding for the tournament, let alone about the imminent cut-off point.

And being chosen already for the Rugby World Cup means the city has already impressed the governing body in charge of the world’s third largest sporting event.

It’s not as if the FIFA iteration would be radically different to it’s IRB cousin.

Yes, I’m biased, I’m a football fan.

That’s what we do.

But all you have to do is look at a map of the competing cities and you see how a vast swathe of the country is without a nearby venue – and Southampton is in the middle of that hole.

FIFA normally allows only one city to have two stadia in a World Cup – London has shortlisted four.

Is it right that people in say Bournemouth will have to travel so far to the nearest venue?

I thought this was to be a World Cup for the country, not just selected parts of it? Southampton is a unique situation.

At the very least the FA should be interested to hear what the council and the club have to say.

It may turn out that they decide they can’t afford it.

It may be that the FA genuinely think Plymouth and Milton Keynes are better. But if the city shows what it can offer, I’m sure they’ll see that Southampton is what the 2018 bid is lacking.