By Duncan Mackay
December 9 – Baroness Valerie Amos (pictured), Britain’s High Commissioner to Australia, has risked upsetting her hosts by publicly claiming that England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup is much stronger than any of its rivals, including Australia’s.
Amos, a Labour Peer who was part of the Board for England 2018 before taking up her new position in October, said she was more convinced than ever that England were the favourites after observing Australia’s bid and the success of David Beckham when he met several high-ranking members of FIFA’s Executive Committee in Cape Town last week.
She told the Sydney Morning Herald: ”It’s been interesting to watch another bidding nation and what they are doing, but I think the England bid is going very well.
“I think that last week in South Africa went very well with David Beckham.
“He did capture the headlines.
”I think England is a place where you have people from across the world who all support soccer, as you would say here.
“They would be really interested in going out and supporting teams from right across the world.”
Amos’ comments will aggravate Australians at a time that they are already upset that Prince William, who is officially second in line to become the country’s head of state, is publicly supporting England’s bid ahead of their own.
Amos, who remains on the England 2018 advisory board chaired by former Birmingham City chief executive Karren Brady, claimed that the fact that football was the number one sport in England and did not have to share the headlines with other codes would give it a decisive edge over Australia, along with the fact that there were already several stadiums in England that were capable of staging major international fixtures.
She said: ”What I’ve found since I’ve been here is people are interested in a variety of sports.
“They are interested in cricket, they are interested in Aussie rules, which is what you call football, they are interested in tennis, in rugby and in soccer, too..we saw with your recent golfing tournament [in which Tiger Woods played], too, that there was a lot of interest.”
Many experts fear that a weakness of Australia’s bid could be the lack of stadia built specifically for football.
Amos said: ”In England there are a lot of cities that have expressed strong interest in participating.
”There’s a level of enthusiasm across the entire country and we’ve got a lot of cities, 16, have already signed up, and some have more than one stadium.
“The level of the stadia is high and we would expect that to be a key part of our bid.
”Basically, I would like to see England win for 2018.
“I think it would be great for it to come back to Europe.”
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