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Poland ´confident´ on Euro 2012 chances despite jitters
WARSAW (AFP) - Poland's sports chief said on Thursday that he was "very confident" the country's joint bid with Ukraine to hold Euro 2012 would win the race, despite political crisis, corruption and jitters about transport links and match venues.
UEFA will choose the hosts of the European football championships at an April 18 meeting in the Welsh capital Cardiff, and the Polish-Ukrainian camp are trying to calm concerns and make sure they beat rival joint bidders Hungary and Croatia, as well as Italy.
"We may not have as much experience as the Italians. And unlike Hungary, which is a candidate for the third time, this is our first bid. But we have a chance. I'm very confident," Sports Minister Tomasz Lipiec told AFP.
"We have plenty of advantages. We are extremely determined and we represent a market of almost 100 million people. UEFA sees the championships as a business, and that could count in our favour against the bid by the Hungarians and Croats," whose combined population is some 15 million, Lipiec said.
Lipiec played down the potential impact of the bitter political crisis in neighbouring Ukraine, where supporters of the prime minister and president are facing off after the latter dissolved parliament.
"The events in Kiev certainly don't help us, but there's no need to panic. Ukraine will have democratic elections and the situation will rapidly become stable again," he said.
He also said he saw a silver lining to the corruption scandal which has badly dented the image of Polish football.
"The fact that we have launched an anti-corruption campaign can only work in our favour," he said.
Poland has been gripped by a two-year-old match-fixing scandal which has led to more than 60 arrests, including several referees, a member of the Polish Football Association (PZPN) leadership and a string of club officials.
The scandal has led the PZPN to suspend two corruption-tainted clubs, Arka Gdynia and Gornik Leczna, from the first division, as part of a wider government-speared crackdown on graft.
"You can also talk about unstable governments in Italy, as well as corruption in football. Plus they have a hooligan problem," said Lipiec.
"Hungary also has political stability issues, while there's a problem with stadium security in Croatia," he added.
Infrastructure is also seen as a weak link in the Polish-Ukrainian bid.
But Polish Transport Minister Jerzy Polaczek countered that around 26 billion euros (35 billion dollars) is guaranteed to help fit the bill, thanks mostly to a European Union finance package for Poland which runs until 2013.
"Road, rail and air projects will get more than 19 billion euros," which will be topped up with Polish government money, Polaczek said at a joint press conference with Lipiec.
"Giving us Euro 2012 would make us step up these projects," he added.
Polaczek noted that the Polish government had already decided to speed up construction of the new A4 motorway linking Germany to Ukraine via southern Poland, so that it would be ready for 2012 rather than the original 2015.
Critics of the Polish-Ukrainian bid point to the vast distances between the planned venues in the two countries.
Around 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles) separate Gdansk, in northern Poland, from Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, for example.
Only 23 kilometres (14 miles) of that is motorway, and the road journey currently takes around 22 hours.
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