David Dein calls for England 2018 World Cup bid support
 England's World Cup 2018 international president David Dein has told BBC Sport the bid team needs the country behind it ahead of the 2 December vote. England 2018 fears there could be a backlash against the bid from Fifa members unhappy with the British media. Dein said: "We are at a critical time, everybody is working full out to try to get the World Cup back to England." Meanwhile Fifa vice-president Jack Warner has criticised a BBC Panorama programme being broadcast on Monday. The programme will examine the bidding to stage the 2018 World Cup. Last week England 2018 leaders branded the BBC "unpatriotic" for screening the investigation so close to the vote. The documentary will be broadcast three days before the vote, and Warner said it was "deliberately designed to negatively impact" on England's bid. Warner, whose vote is seen as crucial to England's hopes, claims the programme is "a personal vendetta". BBC Panorama responded by saying: "Panorama has a reputation for strong, independent and probing investigative journalism. The findings of the Panorama investigation into Fifa will be in the public interest." However Dein told the BBC the bid was still on track despite the media furore. He said: "We're in it to win it and hopefully we'll get a good result. We need the country behind us." England's bid team has dispatched envoys across the world this week in a final effort to secure votes ahead of the vote on who will stage the World Cup in 2018 and 2022. Dein, the former Arsenal and FA vice-chairman, travelled to Rio de Janeiro where he had hoped to have informal meetings with Fifa president Sepp Blatter and Brazil's Fifa member Ricardo Terra Teixeira on Monday.
The bid team is staging a day-long safety and security seminar at the home of CONMEBOL in the Paraguayan capital Asuncion on Tuesday, part of its campaign to gain support from the South American Fifa executive committee members. And Dein added: "We've got to concentrate on one thing and one thing only - to give it our best shot. "We've got a very interesting few days to come and obviously we want to do our best and we are in it to win it. "English football and particularly the Premier League goes to over 210 countries around the world, it's the most watched football product of any nation, we've go a lot going for ourselves." England 2018 chairman Geoff Thompson, chief executive Andy Anson and ambassador Paul Elliott are being joined in Kuala Lumpur by Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to woo the four Asian members of the 22-man executive committee who will vote on the World Cup hosts. The bidding process came into sharp focus following an undercover investigation by the Sunday Times in October in which it was alleged that Fifa members Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii asked for money in return for voting on World Cup hosting rights. Adamu, from Nigeria, was later suspended from all football activity by Fifa's Ethics Committee for three years, while Tahitian Temarii received a one-year suspension. Both were also handed fines. They are now prohibited from taking part in the vote to decide who will host the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals. England face competition from Netherlands/Belgium, Russia and Spain/Portugal for the 2018 tournament. The host of the 2022 contest will also be decided on 2 December, with Australia, Japan, Qatar, South Korea and the United States competing for the rights. | |||
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