UEFA´s Platini praises Polish Euro 2012 drive

Co-host Poland’s preparations for the 2012 European championships are on track, the president of the continent’s football governing body UEFA, Michel Platini, said Thursday.

“Today, things are going well,” Platini told reporters after meeting in Warsaw with Poland’s sports minister and the national football federation and heaping praise on both.

“A good job is being done,” he added.

In 2007, UEFA sparked surprise by choosing Poland and its neighbour Ukraine to hold Euro 2012 ahead of much-fancied Italy.

Platini travelled to Poland after visiting Ukraine earlier this week. There, he had reaffirmed that the championships would go ahead as scheduled.

“The good news we had was that things were on track and we were given more confidence from this visit,” said David Taylor, UEFA’s general secretary.

Poland and Ukraine, who have never before hosted such a high-profile sporting event, have been dogged by concerns about their ability to meet commitments on the construction and refurbishment of match venues to replace their often shabby arenas.

“I don’t see any big problems in Poland… You’re going to have great stadiums, fabulous ones,” Platini insisted.

Despite the positive read-out, Taylor warned: “Let’s not be complacent in Poland. There’s more to be done.”

Platini acknowledged that there was a “small problem” with keeping tabs on the construction of Poland’s venues.

The Poles are preparing six championships-standard stadiums, even though each host was only required to offer four.

UEFA has yet to make its final pick of the venues on the list of potential match sites. It is due to announce that decision at a meeting on May 12 and 13 in the Romanian capital Bucharest.

Taylor noted that stadiums must be ready well in advance, particularly when, like Warsaw’s planned arena, they are not home to a club and therefore do not host regular matches.

“We’ll need to have test events there to make sure the stadium is fully operational before we have major crowds coming to our event,” he said.

Worries have also focused on upgrading hotels to cope with the influx of fans, teams, journalists and UEFA staff, plus transport infrastructure, which is sometimes a relic of the communist era and in many cases has suffered years of under-investment.

“When it comes to construction, refurbishment and infrastructure, things are easier on the Polish side than the Ukrainian side. But the belief is the same in both countries that they’ll manage a great tournament,” Platini said.

He nonetheless underscored infrastructure concerns in Ukraine, saying “the stadiums are going to be built, but it’s a little more complicated with the airports.”

“And the problem of hotels is more complicated still… They don’t have hotels right now. They’re hoping that private investors will build them,” he said.

He noted there are also accommodation headaches in Poland, where “there are hotels but the contracts for them haven’t been signed” to earmark them for Euro 2012.

Poland’s Sports Minister Miroslaw Drzewiecki said the issue was related to negotiations between hotels and travel agencies that will organise packages for fans.