The opening press conference ahead of the U20 World Cup descended into farce. Photo / Getty
The opening press conference ahead of the U20 World Cup descended into farce. Photo / Getty
If there has been a less joyous official opening press conference for a major(ish) global sporting event than this afternoon's Fifa U20 World Cup fiasco at Sky City's Conservatory in Auckland then I'd love to hear about it.
I can only assume someone must have collapsed and diedmid-conference. And they must have been awfully popular, leading to a tremendous outpouring of dismay, angst and misery.
Traditionally official press openings are dreadfully dull events. Officials wonk on about how delighted they are to be there and how wonderful the locals are, then journalists chime in with questions so meaningless they scarcely deserve to be punctuated with a ?
If you get really lucky Dave Currie might do a haka.
After 40 minutes someone mercifully calls a close, people exchange false grins and head on their way knowing they've achieved precisely squat other than dignifying an important event with their presence.
It's grim, but necessary, and worthy of at least a little false enthusiasm.
Oh, what Fifa's three-strong delegation would have given for such mundanity. Instead we had seven minutes of platitudinous opening addresses followed by a four-minute question-and-no-answers session that ended with the Fifa delegation fleeing for the elevators.
In fairness to the hapless Fifa contingent, their Zurich overlords could have not landed a larger steaming turd on their plates had they specially commissioned an elephant to defecate on the shining silver trophy that nobody in the room paid the slightest attention to.
The problem for the Fifa crew was that there really was an elephant in the room. The tournament's chairman, vice president Jeffrey Webb, has been arrested as part of a sweeping investigation into corruption in within the game's corridors of power. But the Fifa underlings in the corridors of an Auckland casino simply were not allowed to discuss that excruciatingly awkward fact, reducing the event to a farce.
Perhaps the only people to come out of the debacle with any credit were Kiwi journalists who, in a rare show of unanimity, refused to dignify the farce by not asking a single question that did not relate to "happenings in Zurich".
One can only hope the young Kiwis who take the pitch against Ukraine on Saturday can muster such a fiercely coordinated and committed display.
In the face of such collective non-compliance, Fifa's delegation did what Jose Mourinho might well described as parking the bus (in Fifa's case it's probably a stretch limo) - defending grimly until the opportunity to break out presented itself.
It would have been interesting had someone actually carked it mid presser. Such was the commitment to not disclosing anything useful, odds on questions about the untimely passing would have been diverted to Zurich.
