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Poland, Ukraine host Euro 2012
18/04/2007 15:30 - (SA)
Cardiff - Poland and Ukraine were chosen in a shock vote by European football's governing body Uefa on Wednesday to jointly host the Euro 2012 championships.
They won the fight to host the quadrennial tournament involving the continent's top nations ahead of Italy and another joint bid from Hungary/Croatia.
It will be the first time that either Poland or Ukraine have hosted a major football championship and will be seen as major boost to the sport in eastern Europe in the face of decades of domination from wealthy western countries.
Next year's Euro 2008 finals will be jointly held by Austria and Switzerland.
The decision, announced by new Uefa president Michel Platini, was a huge shock as world champions Italy had been hot favourites, while the Polish/Ukraine bid was seen as the rank outsider.
The Italians had been calling for a fresh start following concerns over the match-fixing scandal that rocked their domestic football last year and the crowd violence that halted all play earlier this year.
They boasted the best existing infrastructure and the experience of hosting two previous European championships in 1968 and 1980, the 1990 World Cup finals and last year's Winter Olympics in Turin.
The quadrennial tournament was jointly hosted by Belgium and the Netherlands in 2000 and will be shared between Austria and Switzerland next year, but organisational problems were raised in the cases of Poland/Ukraine and Hungary/Croatia.
But Uefa officials pushed these concerns aside and instead grabbed the chance to award the finals to former Eastern Bloc countries for the first time since Yugoslavia hosted the 1976 finals.
Much had been made about the long distances involved for teams if Uefa awarded the finals to Poland and Ukraine and the poor state of the roads linking the two countries and the lack of proper stadiums.
But the joint bid had enthusiastic backing from the Polish government and such as former leader Lech Walesa who called on UEFA to grab the opportunity to spread its boundaries and recognize the changes that have swept across eastern Europe in the last 15 years.
The winning bid featured eight venues for the finals in seven years time, four in Poland and four in Ukraine.
The Uefa decision brought immediate praise from Ukraine's top football official Grigory Surkis.
"We are grateful to all of the Uefa executive council members for their decision to accord us the right to host the European championship," Surkis told Ukrainian television.
"I promise that we will do our best to hold the championship at the highest possible level." he added.
The 2012 finals will once again feature 16 teams despite UEFA examining a proposal to extend it to 24 countries.
Greece are the current European champions having won the title in Lisbon in 2004. Neither Poland nor Ukraine have won the European title.
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Rugby
