chaplin

Thursday, December 02, 2010

You don't think they decided that today, do you?

I've sat on company boards for the last twenty-five years and I've never seen one occasion when a serious vote was taken without the chairman either: a) being pretty certain of the outcome or; b) having already prepared some means of deferring the decision if it looked like it might go the other way. All the important board meetings I've been involved with were preceded by quiet consultations during which likely outcomes were rehearsed and discussed. The idea that such an experienced bureaucrat as Sepp Blatter would go into a meeting like today's choice of World Cup venues without having a fair idea of how it was likely to turn out is a bit far-fetched for me.

5 comments:

  1. Everyday, a little piece of what I love about football dies. I should know better at my age.

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  2. Seconded. But I'm happy that the next 8 years of greed, backhanders, corruption, dodgy deals involving football club directors and construction companies, Rupert Murdoch, tabloid hysteria and all the rest might not be any worse that they would have been anyway. According to Wikileaks, Russia seems to have the, er, infrastructure to cope...

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  3. The question that seems to be being asked over and over by most news outlets (only minutes ago by BBC News) is 'who's to blame?'. Why are do we always need to look for a scapegoat, an underhand johnny-foreigner or whoever, to point the finger at? No one ever seems to put forward the notion that we may just have lost a fair fight...

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  4. Do you really think you could've afforded it so close to the 2012 Olympics? Sometimes we all need to get a grip on realty...

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  5. Whyever not? Compared with the Olympics, the World Cup would have cost peanuts to stage - virtually all the stuff you need to stage it is there.

    And proximity to previous Olympics didn't stop Mexico in 1970 and West Germany in 1974 hosting World Cups.

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