Qatar, quite clearly, will be a dreadful place to host the 2022 World Cup and the decision to award the tournament to such an unsuitable and undeserving non-football nation said more about Fifa's warped priorities than any amount of after-the-event English carping about the 2018 vote going Russia's way. That said, one can only admire Mohamed Bin Hammam and the Qatari Football Association for their refusal to let Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini kick sand in their faces.

Bin Hammam has just told Blatter he can forget about switching the 2022 event to winter and was even more scathing about Platini's insulting suggestion that Qatar could share its World Cup with other Gulf states. Imagine if England had won its bid and then been told before the celebrations had died down that it might have to farm out a few games to Holland and France. Qatar won the vote fair and square – it must have done because Fifa said so – and now has the right to organise its own tournament as it wishes. If the summer temperatures will embarrass anyone who cares about the welfare of footballers or the standard of games, Fifa's executive committee should have thought about that in the first place. If Qatar is too small and restrictive to do full justice to the world's biggest football tournament, one would have thought the matter might have been noticed in the years of campaigning that led up to the vote, not a month or so afterwards.

The 2022 event is rapidly turning into a fiasco that can only bring even greater embarrassment for Fifa, which is why everyone is siding with the president of the Asian federation and enjoying the discomfort of Blatter and Platini. Because neither of those administrators could resist twisting the knife after England had lost the 2018 vote. Rather than admit their voting process might be flawed or the terms of engagement somewhat unclear, both preferred to depict the English as bad losers, for having the ill grace to grumble when a fair vote went against them.

Now Blatter and Platini are doing exactly the same thing, seeking to amend after a vote what should have been clearly established before it and Qatar is having none of it. Even people with no previous knowledge of Qatari football – that is, 99.9% of the world's population and most of Qatar – are cheering for Bin Hammam as though he were the new Pelé. While Fifa's version of Sons of the Desert is not quite as funny as Laurel and Hardy's, it has certainly gotten them into another fine mess.

Three outcomes now seem possible. Either Fifa graciously back down and the 2022 tournament goes ahead in the Qatari summer. A moral victory for the host nation but bad news for football, even if this was the formula that all Fifa's eminences actually voted for.

Alternatively, Fifa could get tough, admit a mistake and take the tournament somewhere else. There would be severe legal and financial consequences and Fifa's reputation as honest brokers and trusted guardians of the game would never survive, but that may not be the worst of developments. At least we might have a chance of a decent tournament. More likely, given that the tournament is still 11 years away, some sort of compromise will be hammered out and the event moved a few months forward.

Fifa may have copped a bloody nose or two in the skirmishes of the past week, but Blatter knows how to play the long game. All he needs to do is get re-elected for a fifth time in April, maybe by making a concession or two on goalline technology, then he can deal with the pesky Qataris at his leisure. The only problem is that everyone's favourite pesky Qatari, Bin Hammam, will be standing against him for the Fifa presidency, arguing that the organisation needs to update itself and become more transparent. It is hard to know whom to support in this fight. Right is on Bin Hammam's side, right up to the point where he insists on a summer World Cup in Qatar.

Everyone would like to see Blatter get a kicking, but then everyone would like to see World Cups shared fairly around football nations and not hived off to petrodollar economies that immediately encounter difficulties. Just don't forget this is Fifa. There's no point expecting a fair fight or for the good guy to win. What is about to happen has probably happened already and only the terminally naive build up the same hopes twice.

Ferguson bombshell has familiar ring

Spurs have been at the top of their game more often than Manchester United this season and their fans are confident they can end a run of almost 10 years without a league success over Sir Alex Ferguson's team at White Hart Lane today. The last time United lost to Spurs was in May 2001 and they were not remotely bothered about it. It was the final game of the season, they had already won the league and, despite losing their last three matches, United still finished 10 points clear of Arsenal.

Glenn Hoddle had just been installed as Spurs manager and no one at the club attached any particular significance to Harry Redknapp leaving West Ham a few days earlier. Gérard Houllier's Liverpool had just added the Uefa Cup to their FA Cup and Carling Cup haul, but all the talk at the Lane surrounded Ferguson, who had announced he would not only step down the following season but sever all links with United.

The stepping-down bit was not new, the bombshell was that Ferguson was ready to listen to offers from other clubs after failing to reach agreement with the United board over his future role at Old Trafford. "I turned down a lot of opportunities in the past year thinking I'd be staying at United," he said after Spurs' 3-1 victory. "But now I'll be looking elsewhere."

This was big news back then, though within a few days the rift had been healed, promises remade, and an improved pay deal agreed. Then of course Ferguson changed his mind about quitting, so the matter was never put to the test. Yet just for a few days Fergusonie seemed determined to turn his back on United, citing irreconcilable differences about how he and the club saw the future. It is a good thing Wayne Rooney was only 15 at the time and unknown outside Everton. Anyone might think he had been given the seed of an idea.