Poland, Ukraine shock 2012 hosts

POLAND and Ukraine will host the European soccer championship in 2012 after UEFA awarded them the tournament ahead of Italy and another joint bid from Hungary and Croatia yesterday.

Despite the Italian game being blighted by match fixing and crowd violence in the last year, Italy were slight favourites to be awarded the finals for the third time in their history.

Instead, UEFA have gambled by awarding the second largest soccer tournament in the world to two countries who have never previously hosted anything of this magnitude.