Beckham steals the show again as World Cup bidders line up

By David Owen in Cape Town

December 4 – It was a cross between a bazaar and a travel trade conference. Today in Cape Town, on the manicured lawns of a governmental mansion, the bidders for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups finally got to see the whites of each other’s eyes.

Under Table Mountain, inside a plush black marquee, with the Cape sun beating down, ten identical little stands had been set up.

Inside them, the respective A-teams of the dozen countries involved, like market traders, with three hours to hard-sell their candidacies to the world’s media.

Spain and Portugal took an early lead.

Amid the piles of promotional T-shirts, baseball caps and literature with which the stands were loaded, the Spaniards had brought a real bauble: the European Championship trophy.

England were just about alone in eschewing T-shirts: as Simon Johnson, putting in a Trojan stint behind the counter explained to me, bidders had been permitted three gifts, so England had opted for more informational items.

It must seem surreal to the outside world for us to be calibrating bids for a competition that will not take place for twelve-and-a-half years.

And Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, whose backyard we were in, reminded us of this simple fact of life when introducing a 40-minute video show - 10 bidders, four minutes each.

With her country, of course, poised to host the 2010 tournament, Zille compared her sentiments to what Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband must have felt like on seeing the second, third, fourth and fifth.

(Zille later took advantage of the occasion to procure David Beckham’s signiature on two yellow South African football shirts for her nephews.)

The videos were a mixed bunch.

Qatar and Spain, pretty polished; England’s – drawn tenth and last to be shown – with a strange lack of moving images; and the Netherlands and Belgium displaying a rather wonderful quirky humour, typified by Ruud Gullit lauding the “Red Devils’ [the Belgian football team] classic performance in Mexico [in 1986]”.

The Belgian/Dutch clip also included a lengthy contribution from Herman Van Rompuy, billed as Prime Minister of Belgium, albeit standing close to a European flag.

“We had to submit the film about two months ago,” an official explained.

The videos even contained a bona fide news story, since it emerged that Indonesia – poking its head above the parapet for, as far as I am aware, the first time in this contest – had decided to bid only for the 2022 tournament.

I was frankly less struck by the South Korean, Japanese, Ubited States and Australian videos, the last of which tried to cram in too much information for a quickfire four-minute slot.

These opening statements will not count for a lot as the drama of the race unfolds throughout 2010, but as first impressions, they are not without value.

If Spain stole the show at the beginning of the event, the power of Beckham was only too evident by the end.

Sporting a rather cultured Mohican, the world’s most iconic footballer was followed everywhere he went by camera crews and flashbulbs, quickly turning the other stands into depopulated zones.

Under-fire England bid chairman Lord Triesman showed his political antennae were in fine working order, making sure he was extensively photographed with Beckham and England manager Fabio Cappello during this grand finale.

But there was really only one figure the media was interested in – and this at an event also attended by Luis Figo, Ruud Gullit and plenty of other prominent figures.

As I sit here writing this and sipping frozen guava juice, Beckham has just marched past me and clambered into a black 4×4, still pursued by media as if he were leading the Hokey-Cokey at an upper-crust wedding.

You don’t need to be a public relations genius to figure out who the England bid should save its best lines for.

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