Irish Examiner view: The road to Doha and beyond

World Cup draw last night answered most of our questions — but many remain

England head coach Gareth Southgate greeting US head coach Gregg Berhalter during the 2022 soccer World Cup draw in Doha, Qatar. Picture: Hassan Ammar/AP

Last night’s draw for the 22nd World Cup answered most of the questions about who and when and where the competing teams will play this Autumn in Qatar, but not all of them.

The final European berth is still open and, as matters stand, Scotland will face Ukraine in a play-off semi-final with the winners taking on Wales.  Two other places are also to be decided with the winners coming from Costa Rica, Peru, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, or Australia.

Sentimentalists might argue that teams should step aside to allow Ukraine a route through to the world’s most visible sports competition, rather in the way that the Croatian Goran Ivanišević was allowed a wild card entry to Wimbledon in 2001 when ranked number 125 in the world.

He, astonishingly, won that tournament, roared on by a very partisan crowd. No one thinks Ukraine could emulate that feat, but it would be wonderful to see them appear while the Russians are forced to sit at home watching the football, or not, depending on the whims of their state-controlled media.

But nodding Ukraine through will not happen because the transfer of the World Cup to Qatar for an autumn competition represents a bleak moment in the history of the game; a watershed from which it may never seem the same again.

It has been agreed to shut the Premier League, by some margin the world’s most popular soccer competition, for 42 days from Monday, November 14, until St Stephen’s Day, December 26. There may be chaos in that league anyway, depending on what happens to the disposal of Chelsea, the current European and world champions, as part of a process which is appearing increasingly confused, messy and full of polemic. They may stumble across the line at the end of the season in May, but what will happen by August is anyone’s guess.

The England team, having been briefed on human rights abuses in Qatar by the likes of Amnesty and other non-government organisations, have declared themselves “shocked”, with their captain Jordan Henderson describing the Qatari record as “disappointing and horrendous”.

Gareth Southgate’s squad may issue some form of statement on the stance of the host country towards women, the LGBTQ+ community, and migrant workers before the start of the tournament. Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar. And it was illegal in 2010 when the decision was made to give the oil-rich state the world’s leading international football contest.

Those decisions, driven by the liking of the game’s controlling bodies such as Uefa and Fifa for money, of course, are coming back with a vengeance in a much more febrile world. The soft power celebration of Russia at the 2018 World Cup can now be viewed in exactly the same way as Hitler’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ Olympics in Berlin 1936. A terrible warning which was ignored by a self-indulgent world and which may yet lead to a continent being laid to waste.

All of this seems to be lost on the Fifa president Gianni Infantino, a man far too young to have remembered Mussolini and his squadristi in his parental home of Italy. He was born in 1970, 25 years after the guns fell silent. Which is why he can speak so blithely about the Moscow world cup “not creating a lasting peace” and how football can be like “Mandela and Gandhi” in creating “another way”.

Infantino should listen more closely to the stinging address of the Norwegian FA president Lise Klaveness, a former international footballer, who said that both 2018 and 2022 were awarded “in unacceptable ways with unacceptable consequences.” For her troubles, she was more or less urged to sit down and shut up by a Honduran delegate and then told that her views were outdated by Hassan al-Thawadi, Qatar’s 2022 secretary general. For good measure, he added that she should “educate” herself. 

And that is what you might expect outspoken women to be told in Qatar. The decision to award it the 2022 World Cup will be seen to have been a terrible mistake. It is simply a matter of how quickly the riyal drops for some people.