Menton, Lyons try to fathom bid failure
Or at least, that was the impression gained by listening to bid members Brendan Menton and Simon Lyons yesterday as they tried to fathom their dismal showing in Thursday's voting by UEFA's Executive Committee to stage Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland.
Both men, former FAI General Secretary Menton and bid marketing director Lyons, admitted they had failed to account for the geopolitical sway in favour of countries from the eastern side of the continent after a succession of tournaments held on the western seaboard, and then conceded they had been mistaken in concentrating their voting strategy by assuming they would reach the last two or three bids.
Menton also pondered aloud whether the Celts had been lulled into a false sense of security by scoring so highly in their technical assessment only to discover that UEFA's National Teams Committee had not even recommended them as one of the top four bids. And Lyons accepted the rookie campaigners had much to learn about the political manoeuvring surrounding the bid process.
Dazed and confused by the fact the Celtic bid had attained a 94% technical rating, second only to the winning bid and yet lost out to so called outside bids such as Greece/Turkey and eventual runners up Hungary, Lyons said: "Our strategy all along was to get into that final group. If we got in there we believed we could go on to win. That was the source of our optimism and we believed it was the right strategy."
Yet Lyons refused to accept the Celtic bid was scuppered from the start. "Absolutely not," he said. "We had guys working with us Ernie Walker, David Will and Des Casey who had walked the corridors of UEFA for 14 years. They understood the politics of what was happening there.
"We got no strong message that a swing to the east was important. We got a message early on that 96 was going to play a role, more particularly with Scotland as opposed to Ireland.
"However, it was not to be in the end. We always knew that the National Teams Committee, when it came to them presenting their case to the Executive Committee, that their views would not be given much weighting. We then realised, when we were not even on the list, that it had a big impact. People on the Executive Committee were saying, 'why aren't they there?'
"This process is about two things. It's about putting forward a technical bid and trying to be as professional as you can. But with that comes a political decision. So it weighted somewhere in between and from tournament to tournament those weights will differ. Politics played a large role but we knew that."
What they hadn't prepared for, however, was a process of Weakest Link style voting where the least attractive bid was eliminated. Russia, the joint Bosnian Croatian effort and then the four way Nordic campaign were sent packing before the Celts were voted off, five votes to three, in a run off against Hungary.
Neither Lyons nor Menton would countenance any endorsement of the view that the perceived lack of political unity in Ireland towards the bid, or the lack of clarity surrounding the use of Croke Park and the yet to be constructed National Stadium, had led to the downfall of the bid.
Lyon said: "Let's make one thing clear. The stadiums and security issues were not an issue. We got 94%. If we were to go back and have a solo bid with all the stadiums built, what would we get, maybe 96%? That's the reality, guys."
Menton added: "Let me turn it on its head a little bit. Hungary came second yet they would have had to invest one billion euro as part of their proposal.
"We went into the final presentation with a stadium agreement from
Lansdowne Road and a commitment from the Government that there would be a second stadium within Dublin. That was enough for us."
But not, ultimately, enough for UEFA's Executive Committee.
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