EuroBasket 2009 / You call this hosting a tourney?

POZNAN, Poland - Inefficiency, inflexibility and a disdain for English among the Polish hosts of the EuroBasket 2009 tournament ought to flash a red light at officials planning to hold soccer's Euro 2012 championship here. Perhaps the shoddiness is restricted to Poznan, Poland's fifth largest city with 600,000 people - yet it's hard to explain how the press center here offers a slew of laptop computers (with an Internet connection that breaks down every other minute) can't offer a hot water dispenser, or at least a cafe within a decent radius.

Ignoring that English is the international language is evident in the airport in Warsaw, trains across the country, the street signs of Poznan and even the minimal information available at the tourist information desks. Even the French, who declared a culture war against Americanization, are ahead of the Poles.

And to make it harder, the locals do not speak English but rather German. This is understandably a result of centuries of occupation, from the Austro-Hungarian empire to the Third Reich, not to mention the proximity to Berlin. However, this anthropological detail does not compensate for anyone speaking neither Polish nor German who gets lost in the streets of Poznan.

It's hard to imagine UEFA being pleased with the way the city has handled the EuroBasket. There are no flags, no parties, no billboards.

"There was a basketball boom in the 1990s, but it ended quickly," explains Katya, one of the locals. "We're holding out for the Euro 2012 to go wild." Her friend Zdenek agrees, adding that even local teams have a hard time drawing a crowd. "A few hundred usually come to this arena, while 15-20,000 go to soccer," he says.

Mikolai, the third person in the group, says we should call a spade a spade: It's all about poor marketing. "There are signs here about the EuroBasket, but they only mention the final in Katowice," he notes. "The only attempt to attract people from this area was done months ago, when they organized a regional tournament to try to break the Guinness book of world records in dribbling.