I'll lay my cards on the table, I'm no soccer fan. I don't support any club nor do I ever watch the game on television. My sport? My natural preference would be another team sport, Women's Beach Volleyball but if the missus is around then Rugby (Union, preferably) wins every time. But soccer is the national game, or so I'm told, and there's this competition looming in Brazil: the World Cup. The England Team will, apparently, be based in Rio at the Royal Tulip Hotel in whose foyer rival drugs gangs fought a gun battle in 2010. Formerly known as the Rio InterContinental, it has an open sewer flowing in front of it and it backs onto the Rochina slum, the largest and most dangerous in the city. The hotel has seen better days, the furniture is well-worn and, according to reviews on TripAdvisor, the rooms smell from lack of cleaning and there are broken fittings everywhere. Sound ideal for a football team, I'd say: any damage they did would probably be an improvement! That's assuming they and their huge entourage of trainers, masseurs, food-tasters, boot-boys, personal shoppers and other assorted lackeys and hangers-on manage to cross the Atlantic and get to Rio. They won't be flying "the flag". British Airways has told the Football Association that it can not dedicate an aircraft plus its crew and absorb the operational costs for the one month of the competition which the airline estimates would cost a cool £10 million - and that's before considering the revenue that aircraft has lost by being out of service. We're not talking about a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320, which BA have in abundance, but something rather bigger: a Boeing 777 or A340 at the very least and they're in rather shorter supply and heavily utilised during the northern hemisphere summer when this competition takes place. Not only does the England team and its travelling circus need to get to Rio and back but it also needs the plane to fly it domestically between Rio and Manaus, Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte where it will play its group games. All that BA would get out of the arrangement would be a press photo of the team standing on the steps similar to this one taken in 2002 when BA flew England team for the World Cup in Japan and South Korea: Or perhaps the players could each donate a week's salary which would probably more than cover the £10 million charter cost. Failing that, an opportunity for Ryan Air, perhaps! I do wonder if the England managers aren't being a tad optimistic about their team's chances as pundits who profess to know more about the game than I (not at all difficult!) say that England has been placed in a very tough group and may not survive. Well if they're served a diet of salmonella by their hotel whilst their rivals dine on salmon, then they probably will take an early bath.
I think you will find that Woy is very level headed about England's chances and has gone out of his way to neutwalise the burden of expectation in Wio and adopt a wealistic appwoach.
BA wasn't going to get anything for the plane - or towards its fuel, crew and other operational costs. The FA expected them to provide that all free of charge.
