SOCCER/EURO 2008 BID: SFA Chief executive David Taylor, chairman of the committee overseeing the Scottish and Irish bid to play host to the European Championship finals in 2008, had joked about UEFA's prospects of keeping its executive committee's decision secret until Lennart Johansson got to open the envelope containing the name of the winners in front of the media and delegations yesterday.

As he wandered into the main hall of the Intercontinental Hotel here in Geneva a little after lunchtime for the big Swede's announcement, still anxiously unaware of his bid's fate, however, it might have been dawning on him that he had underestimated the men pulling the strings within European football's governing body.

Events that had already unfolded behind the scenes a short distance away in Nyon certainly suggested that he and the rest of the campaign's leading figures had badly misjudged the attitude of some of the organisation's key decision-makers to what they clearly saw as a flawed bid.

UEFA's National Teams Committee (NTC) sat down to begin their deliberations on the seven competing bids at just after 9 a.m. yesterday. Before the committee's 11 members, all little-known administrators drawn from across Europe, were the reports of the technical assessments compiled by UEFA's staff and various experts compiled on their visits to each of the 14 countries involved in the bidding process.

Also to be taken into account was the extensive documentation submitted by the bids, including statements of support from governments, and Wednesday's final presentations.

On the technical assessment it was confirmed the Scots and Irish had obtained the second highest score: 94 per cent to the Alpine bid's 95. Those who compiled the report were clearly satisfied by what they had seen in Dublin and Glasgow.

The NTC's members it seems, however, remained more sceptical, and over the course of the next 90 minutes or so the bid was dealt a fatal blow when it was agreed that it would be omitted from the list of four bids to be recommended to the executive committee.

On that list were the Swiss and Austrians, the Hungarians, the Scandinavians and the joint effort by Greece and Turkey. It was widely suggested afterwards that this last bid was recommended for political reasons and was not really considered a serious contender.

Still, all seven bids went before the eight executive committee members initially entitled to vote and it became apparent that the Ireland/Scotland bid still did have some genuine support despite the fact it hadn't received the NTC's imprimatur.

After a period of discussion, the eight set about the business of narrowing the field, and the Bosnian and Croatian joint bid was the first to go. The Russians followed shortly afterwards, and then out went the Scandinavians.

Had the Scots and Irish survived to the final shortlist of three - at which point executive commitee members from excluded bid countries were readmitted - its prospects might have been revived by support from the Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic committee members readmitted to the voting process after the elimination of their own bid.

Johansson, Per Ravn Omdal and Eggert Magnusson had been expected to side with the Celtic nations in the event of a run-off with the Swiss and Austrians, but they never got the chance as the Celtic campaign fell by the wayside next.

With only three proposals, the Alpine, Hungarian and Greek/Turkish bids, now on the table, four committee members - the three Scandinavians and one Russian - were readmitted, leaving two - one Turkish and one Swiss - outside.

In a show of hands amongst the electorate of 12, the Alpine and Hungarian bids then received five votes each (the Swiss/Austrian total was precisely what had been expected the previous day), while the Greeks and Turks got the remaining two. That bid was then excluded.

In the final ballot, conducted secretly, the balance shifted decisively in favour of the favourites, who apparently picked up the Greece/Turkey votes, plus two of Hungary's voters from the previous round to win by nine to three.

Quite how it went so badly wrong for the Irish and Scots at the NTC stage of the process remained unclear last night, but England's FIFA vice-president David Will said he was "astounded" when he discovered the bid was not among the four recommended. He added that the chances of the bid recovering from that blow were extremely remote.

Those chances were further reduced by the ease with which suporters of the Swiss/Austrian bid used the stadium situation in Scotland and Ireland as a stick with which to beat their rivals.

"We're talking about a bid that involves one city with three stadiums and one with none," one member is reported to have said during a sometimes heated meeting.

On the Irish side of things there were doubts about the ability to deliver two adequate venues in Dublin, but even stronger concerns existed with regard to the concentration of three venues in Glasgow.

Only two of the other six bidders had intended to use more than one venue in any city if they got to stage the tournament. In addition to having three in Glasgow, the Irish and Scots proposed having two in Dublin and, if Easter Road in Edinburgh ended up being used, as remained a distinct possibility, there would be two there also.

Glasgow, however, with its potential for crowd trouble and logistical difficulties, presented the main worry. Last week the bid director, John Henderson, had dismissed the idea that this concentration would prove a liability, remarking "what we are selling UEFA here is a hub concept". Yesterday it became clear that the NTC was not in the mood for buying.

Then there Dublin's current lack of any suitable venues and the question of whether the two required would have been delivered. Despite claims to the contrary, the failure to clarify the issue of which grounds would be used and, if they were to be built, how they would be paid for, before the deadline left plenty of room for uncertainty and this again is said to have been exploited.

The bid's chances of overcoming these setbacks were probably severely dented by the unexpected emergence of the Hungarians as joint leaders in the early rounds of voting.Their presentation on Wednesday had been a deeply emotional one that sidestepped any attempt to deal in detail with the technical aspects of the bid and appealed instead to UEFA to make a bold gesture towards the former communist states of central Europe.

Even their officials conceded to being surprised by the extent of their success. "What we said to them was that it was a question of whether they wanted to view the championship as development project or a chance to have another nice comfortable tournament," said Per Haue-Pedersen, an adviser to the bid team. "It was a very distinctive message.

"We told them that this week the EU will expand into new areas of central Europe and that today football had the chance to do the same. We didn't talk about stadiums or numbers of phone lines or toilets. That's all nonsense that you can sort out later.

"I think the result shows that our message got through," he added.

It certainly did, but not, he conceded, quite to the required extent, because "in the end they did decide that VIP boxes and all the rest of those things were what was most important to them".

That the process appears to have developed into a choice between dependability on the one hand and emotion on the other simply left little room for a bid that attempted to mix both but ended up possessing neither in sufficient quantities.