No Qatar re-vote, says FIFA official
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, April 2, 2014
Michel D'Hooghe, FIFA's medical officer, has insisted there will be no re-vote on the controversial decision to award Qatar the 2022 World Cup finals.
"There will be absolutely no re-vote," D'Hooghe told the London Evening Standard yesterday, a day after Japan said it was ready to step in if FIFA stripped Qatar of staging the 2022 World Cup.
"Some in the English press want that (a re-vote). But it's not the English press that decide."
D'Hooghe was one of the FIFA executive committee members who in 2010 awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 edition to Qatar. Both decisions caused uproar and led to widespread allegations regarding the bidding process, which are now being investigated by FIFA ethics chief Michael Garcia.
There was a bitter reaction in England after the country's bid to stage the 2018 finals garnered a mere two votes and was eliminated in the first ballot.
But Belgium's D'Hooghe, asked if corruption had played a part in either vote, told the Standard: "Absolutely not. I had no feeling anything was going on then and I still have no feeling that there was corruption during this vote."
D'Hooghe, who led the unsuccessful joint Belgium/Holland bid for 2018, added that many within FIFA felt continued British criticism of the bid process was "partly sour grapes" over the rejection of England's 2018 offer and that no matter how much football's world governing body reformed its structure, it would never satisfy some of its harshest critics.
"But, for the British press, whatever we do is never enough. And the feeling in FIFA is that all this British criticism is partly sour grapes. In football you win and you lose.
"If England feel they have not had a World Cup since 1966, then Belgium has never had the World Cup. England must not complain. They just had the Olympics and organized it fantastically."
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