Emmet Malone reports on the doubts that still surround the joint bidof the Austrians and Swiss

Just as the Irish and Scots are playing their trump card, the size of their stadiums, for all that it's worth here in Geneva this week so the Austrians and Swiss, with their campaign slogan "Close To You", do their best to remind you who has the geographical edge in this process.

Nobody, not even the members of the Irish delegation who flew in yesterday, denies that the locals look like being the bidders to beat, but their claim that victory is still there for the snatching is something that the Swiss in particular know better than to argue with.

Though the small Alpine nation hosted the World Cup back in 1954, their attempts to attract high-profile sports events, primarily the Winter Olympics, since have met with a succession of failures.

In all there have been five attempts to lure back the Winter Games and one rather optimistic bid to once again play host to the planet's biggest football competition. On that occasion neighbours France won the right to hold the tournament and it is hard to imagine that the Swiss could have come close to matching the scale of the 1998 finals.

It is Sion's third failure in the Olympic stakes that still causes most embarrassment here, however, with the over-confident Swiss officials involved in the bid having done everything bar hire an open top bus to take them to the airport on the way to Tokyo where the vote was to be held. Having lost out to Salt Lake City four years previously, the Swiss were positive that they would win the 2006 event but ended up being beaten by 53 votes to 36 in the final round of voting by Turin.

Still deeply conscious of the humiliation that accompanied the outcome, officials involved in this bid have no desire to tempt fate again, but then the strength of the case they and the Austrians make to be allowed host Euro 2008 does a good deal of their talking for them.

True, their venues will be smaller than those to be used in Scotland and Dublin but there will still be as many tickets available for sale as was the case for the last championship, in Belgium and the Netherlands two years ago.

More importantly, there is widespread acceptance that given the amount of government support the bid enjoys in both countries, there is little question that all of the stadiums will be in place and operational by the target date of 2006.

Much has been made by the Irish and Scots, though, of the fact that only 80,000 of the proposed 220,000 seats are at present in place and it is pointed out that construction of the Zurich venue depends on a successful outcome in a referendum of the local population.

Such a vote scuppered Berne's bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2008 only last year when residents there baulked at the prospect of paying for the tournament. A senior official is adamant, however, that the vote in Zurich is concerned primarily with the handover of publicly-owned land and that no significant opposition to the proposal has so far materialised. Local journalists endorse that view.

In fact the objections that have been raised concerning the stadium development programme relate almost exclusively to secondary use of the venues and the traffic they might generate. The Irish and Scots have made much of the sustainability of their grounds but one of the reasons that the Swiss and Austrian venues are so small is the number of other facilities being squeezed in to ensure financial viability.

In Innsbruck the Tivoli-Neu Stadium site will include restaurants and shopping, a sports centre, office and other business space. At the rebuilt Wankdorf there will, among other things, be a school while in Basle the recently opened St Jakob Park includes an old people's home.

The facilities then, like the bid they form the backbone of, are well thought out and planned on the basis of providing the local populations as well as UEFA with a dividend out of Europe's biggest sporting event.

Still there are lingering doubts for those centrally involved in promoting their case. Sion hasn't been forgotten and neither has the success of Portugal at this stage of the process for Euro 2004 when Spain were favourites.

"I know we have the best bid and we can deliver everything UEFA wants on time and to their total satisfaction," says Austrian FA president Friedrich Stickler. "But there is always a doubt. We are taking nothing for granted and will work hard to convince them that our bid is the best one.

"I don't think we can make it a better bid than this," he continues. "I just hope that it is what UEFA is looking for." And his rivals from Europe's north-west, of course, will be hoping that it doesn't quite fit the bill.