Should Ukraine be given a free pass into this year’s football World Cup? Boris Johnson has given his support to the idea, but there’s one downside: their entry into the tournament could come at the expense of Scotland or Wales. This hardly seems fair: Scotland will tonight feature in their first World Cup draw in 25 years; for Wales it is 64 years. Whatever the tragedy that has befallen Ukraine, it’s wrong to expect Wales and Scotland to step aside.
While we perhaps shouldn’t take the notoriously football phobic PM at his word, far more football savvy commentators agree with Boris. Jim White in the Daily Telegraph called for Scotland and Wales to do the decent thing and withdraw, declaring that ‘Ukraine in Qatar is the thing everyone now craves’. He then added, somewhat insultingly (for Scotland and Wales), that stepping aside would command more respect than qualifying and then being eliminated in the first round.
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