West Indies back-up plan for 2010?

In light of some of the comments that have been attributed to Sepp Blatter over the last 6 months, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this pop up in the ‘Latest News’ section of our website (www.satwentyten.com) – courtesy of our Google news feed.  Mr Blatter was initially quite right to chivvy along the Local Organising Committee at the end of last year, commenting at one press conference that “There are some shovels and spades left over in Germany from the 2006 that could be given to South Africa to help them get a move on with their stadia”, or something along those lines.  Since then, the FIFA World Cup people have regularly been reviewing construction and other progress for 2010, and announced themselves as being happy that all was on schedule.  So why does Mr Blether keep blurting out that things like “Plan A is South Africa, Plan B is South Africa, Plan C could be [insert any country name] should SA not deliver in time”.  Australia, Germany, USA, Spain, UK, etc have all been bandied around as ‘back-up plans’, but why not the West Indies?  After all they’ve got a whole host of brand spanking new stadia from the 2007 Cricket World Cup.  They were hardly used during that event, and aren’t likely to be over-used in the interim, so they’ll still have that ‘new’ feeling come 2010!

So, Sepp, if you can’t relay the simple message from your own FIFA technical team that “everything is on schedule”, its best you don’t say anything at all.