On Monday morning six men in suits will step off an aeroplane at Heathrow and be whisked to the Dorchester Hotel in London.
Over the following three days they will criss-cross the country gathering information that will go some way to determining England's chances of hosting the 2018 World Cup. If the trip goes badly it could end any hope of the tournament coming home for at least another 20 years.
England is the penultimate stop for Fifa's inspection team, led by the president of the Chilean FA, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, as they tour the nations bidding for arguably the greatest prize in sport. On Thursday they completed their visit to Russia, seen as England's biggest rivals; the next stop is Madrid, to take in the joint bid of Spain and Portugal. They have already been to the Netherlands and Belgium.
Once the inspections are completed, the bid teams will have three more months of global glad-handing before the 24 members of Fifa's executive committee (Ex-co) shut themselves in a no doubt well-appointed conference room in their Zurich HQ and vote on 2 December. If England fail to convince this diverse group of men there is no chance of the World Cup coming to this country until 2030 at the earliest.
Each member of Ex-co has one vote, although some vote in confederation blocks. England are believed to have the support of the Asian vote after the influential Mohamed Bin Hammam of Qatar lavished praise on the Premier League and its impact in the region. He carries four votes with him, and England are set to play a friendly in Thailand next summer to help keep the Thai representative Worawi Makudi onside. The pre-World Cup friendly with Egypt ticked another box – Hany Abo Rida is an Egyptian presence on the Ex-co. In May, members of the bid team trekked around South America, in July they headed for South Africa. There will be many more trips in the next couple of months, but for the next few days the focus will be on home soil.
England's bid team is confident it will not be found wanting in comparison to what the Russians have laid on this week with meetings in the Kremlin and a banquet in St Petersburg's Yusupov Palace. Rasputin was murdered in the palace and the Fifa team could have taken a turn around the "Mad Monk" museum before dinner. A trip to the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussauds would probably be the English equivalent, but that is not understood to be on the schedule. Neither will there be David Beckham – his presence in South Africa and in delivering the bid book in Zurich earlier this year was a fillip to a campaign that was struggling with internal problems. And nor will there be the Prime Minister.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin, as well as the Dutch and Belgium PMs, all entertained the inspectors, but David Cameron will be on holiday and in his stead Nick Clegg will do the meeting and greeting. Cameron telephoned Sepp Blatter personally to apologise and invite him to No 10 in the autumn. Bid insiders are adamant no damage has been done by the Prime Minister's decision to head for Cornwall. And fear not: in the most bizarre turn of a fairly complicated process, Paul the psychic octopus, who found fame predicting results at the World Cup, has been signed up as an official ambassador.
drive from www.independent.co.uk