Piper required to play the failed bidder's lament

EURO 2008 BID: David Taylor still looked some way short of being over the shock that accompanied the news of defeat as he stood up to the podium at the UEFA-organised press conference to congratulate the Austrians and Swiss on their success in winning the right to stage the European Championship finals in 2008.

"Clearly we don't have a piper with us here now," said the SFA chief executive in a quiet voice that was almost drowned out entirely by the noise of the local journalists clamouring to speak to the still-celebrating officials of the Alpine bid. "But if we did I'm sure he'd be playing a bit of a lament."

It wasn't long before Taylor, the FAI's Brendan Menton, and the rest of the joint bid's team were outside having to answer the question of whether their campaign as a whole, with its reliance on too many stadiums in one place and none at all in another, was simply lamentable.

Though clearly taken aback by the news that they had not even been amongst the four bids recommended by the National Teams Committee (NTC), the campaign's leading members restated their belief that the foundations of their bid had been solid.

"I'm disappointed for Irish football," said Menton, who, like the majority of the bid team, left to catch a plane home before the details of what had happened really began to filter down.

"A lot of work, a lot of effort went into this and we thought that we had a good chance of succeeding. We're very disappointed not to have won, but obviously we can't say a whole lot more about it until we start to hear back the reasons why we lost out in the way we did."

Taylor, meanwhile, conceded that "geography was an issue, the stadiums in Ireland were probably an issue, as were the three in Glasgow, but it's too early to size up exactly how much each of the factors mattered".

What was clear from the comments of all of the main participants, however, was that the pivotal role played in their downfall by the NTC had not been anticipated. FAI president Milo Corcoran admitted later that "we never paid too much attention to them to be honest.

"We felt that the political side of things was going well all along, and none of the feedback we received suggested otherwise."

For the Scottish FA, the bid's failure means that the British Government will keep the estimated €100 million it was committed to handing over towards the cost of ground improvements.

For the FAI, though, things are worse, as it means that the pressure on the Government to deliver on the deal made with the association back in March of 2001 - by either building a stadium or securing access for the association to Croke Park for major games - has entirely evaporated.

"The IRFU and ourselves have always said that there is a need for a new stadium regardless of whether the European Championships were coming here," said Menton. "But that wasn't all that this bid was about," he claimed. "I always believed it was worthwhile in its own right because I felt that there were a lot of other things to be gained from bringing an event like this to Ireland."

Both men were careful to pay tribute to their partners in the bid and there were, for the moment at least, few recriminations over how the €2 million bid could have floundered over such basic concerns as the provision and location of stadiums.

It may take some time, however, for the full range of factors that contributed to the defeat to be ascertained, but the bid's steering committee will meet on January 10th.

The prospect of going through the whole process again in four years is likely to be discussed, at least briefly, although Corcoran echoed the widely-held view that the lack of a really major significant footballing nation amongst the bidders meant that this had been Ireland's best chance when he said that it was probably a case of "now or never".

Ireland's former UEFA executive committee member, Des Casey, will be one of those seeking to discover during the weeks ahead just how it was that things came so spectacularly off the rails yesterday. On Tuesday he had said that the determination of executive committee members to keep their intentions secret made the race impossible to call.

"We could win this thing, and we could come nowhere," he had said then. He was right.