East European neighbours Poland and Ukraine were chosen in a shock vote by European soccer's governing body UEFA yesterday to jointly host the Euro 2012 championships.

They won the fight to host the quadrennial tournament involving the continent's top nations ahead of favorites Italy and another fancied joint bid from Hungary/Croatia.

It will be the first time that either Poland or Ukraine have hosted a major soccer championship and will be seen as major boost to the sport in eastern Europe in the face of decades of domination from wealthy western countries.

Next year's Euro 2008 finals will be jointly held by Austria and Switzerland.

The decision, announced by new UEFA president Michel Platini, was a huge shock as world champions Italy had been hot favorites, while the Polish/Ukraine bid was seen as the rank outsider.

The Italians had been calling for a fresh start following concerns over the match-fixing scandal that rocked their domestic soccer last year and the crowd violence that halted all play earlier this year.

They boasted the best existing infrastructure and the experience of hosting two previous European championships in 1968 and 1980, the 1990 World Cup finals and last year's Winter Olympics in Turin.

The quadrennial tournament was jointly hosted by Belgium and the Netherlands in 2000 and will be shared between Austria and Switzerland next year, but organizational problems were raised in the cases of Poland/Ukraine and Hungary/Croatia.

But UEFA officials pushed these concerns aside and instead grabbed the chance to award the finals to former Eastern Bloc countries for the first time since Yugoslavia hosted the 1976 finals.

Poland and Ukraine won in the first round of voting by the UEFA executive committee with eight of the 12 votes, while four went to Italy and none to Croatia and Hungary. 

Much had been made about the long distances involved for teams if UEFA awarded the finals to Poland and Ukraine, the poor state of the roads linking the two countries and the lack of proper stadiums.

But the joint bid had enthusiastic backing from the Polish government and such as former leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa who called on UEFA to recognize the politial and social changes that have swept across eastern Europe in the last 15 years by awarding the finals to his country.

The UEFA decision brought immediate praise from Ukraine's top football official Grigory Surkis.

"We are grateful to all of the UEFA executive council members for their decision to accord us the right to host the European championship," Surkis told Ukrainian television.

"I promise that we will do our best to hold the championship at the highest possible level." he added.

In Warsaw, soccer fans and officials gathered in the city centre to watch the announcement on a giant television screen, burst into applause and chants.

"It will be our chance to show we are capable of organizing large sports events like world championships or even the Olympics," Przemyslaw Gosiewski, an aide to Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said.

"This is our passport to enter the club of elite countries," he added.

In Rome, the reaction was much more muted with Italian sports minister Giovanna Melandri saying the decision had been mainly a political one.

"They wanted to open up the finals to former eastern bloc countries who are striving to fully join the European scene," she told Italian television.

"We just have to accept it in the name of sports and now try to win on the field."

The announcement follows hard on the heels of the recent election of Platini, the French midfield legend who captained his country to the European title on home turf in 1984.

"Today, Poland/Ukraine has been chosen by the UEFA executive committee to host Euro 2012 and they are surely a worthy winner," he said.

(China Daily via AFP April 19, 2007)