Why Egypt?
By
Alaa Abdel-Ghani
Why should Egypt host the 2010 football World Cup? Because we already have everything else -- safe streets, vibrant cities, people with ever-ready 60-watt smiles. And let's not forget what all this is leading up to. We have football -- 5,000 years of it, and we have fans -- millions of them. Nothing missing around here except Miss World and the World Cup. We'd like to have both.
We are not jingoistic but we are unapologetic fans of Egypt. Being Egyptian has something to do with it, of course. But our desire to help bring the World Cup to where we believe it belongs does not stem solely from a sense of patriotic duty. Quite simply, we are convinced that Egypt has the best shot at the tournament because it has the best credentials and, as such, fully deserves to play host to world football's showpiece event.
We are not trying to sex us up -- though if we had Tony Blair for cheerleader, we are sure he would give it his best shot. We are not fabulously grand and great. We have problems. We are not always precision-perfect people, we are not drowning in money and we have things that go bump in the night. (These are our cars and they go bump all night and all day).
We have problems -- but just like everybody else. Mexico was deemed worthy of hosting not one but two World Cups despite its crowds and smog.
As for entrants in the other global sporting extravaganza -- the Olympics -- Atlanta, the city of a superpower, was a logistical mess in 1996 and far from super, while the laid-back Athenians didn't start cracking on next year's Olympic show until they were warned that they might not have one. Very Arab, but, it seems, not exclusively so.
We know we can engineer a spectacle of such a magnitude as the World Cup. We in theory did it before, in the World Cup for youth in 1997. True, that tournament was for under-17s, but it was just about as close as you can get to the real thing.
What is really standing in between us and football glory are the two dozen FIFA people who will vote in secret ballot on 15 May. For them, we want to put our best football foot forward and persuade them that we are as competent, not just as any of our current challengers, but as any of the 15 host countries before us.
In doing so, we certainly do not look to diminish the capabilities of our esteemed opponents South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya. They are without exception all viable candidates. But we do not believe the home of the 2010 edition should be anywhere save Egypt. We have the components that help make countries an attraction and which, in sum, make us who and what we are.
The name's Egypt, a country made of what they called the movie: The Right Stuff. And in the months ahead we intend to prove it. Because if we don't host the World Cup, somebody else will. And that, to us, is a very disconcerting thought.
