Our fatal flaws

THE joint Scottish/Irish bid was doomed from the start, undermined by two fatal flaws in the package they had on offer.

One was the stadium issue in Ireland where members of the UEFA inspection team could not be shown one available stadium up to UEFA standards for hosting the championships when they visited Dublin. The second, and possibly more critical, issue was the fact that Scotland FA officials were promoting three stadiums in Glasgow as a powerful element of their bid.

Officials on both the Irish and Scottish sides of the joint bid were not happy to be confronted with queries on both of these issues. Their reluctance to be drawn into a public discussion on them probably told its own tale.