Hush. Listen a moment. Is that the sound of a snigger we hear emanating from FIFA's corridors of power?

Highly likely because buried beneath the mound of Murray mania and Haye hysteria that has swamped the public prints these past couple of weeks was a news item that surely brought a smirk to the face of Sepp Blatter - not to mention his erstwhile shady sidekick Jack Warner and other assorted cohorts in his FIFA fiefdom.

John Scott, the Englishman running the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, resigned after admitting accepting "gifts and hospitality" from a potential supplier to the next biggest event to be held in here outside the London Olympics.

While this may seem a relatively less significant aberration compared to all that has been going on in FIFA, nonetheless it is deeply embarrassing for British sport as Scott is one of its senior administrative figures, having been International Director of government agency UK Sport and heavily involved in the nation's anti-drugs programme before joining Glasgow 2014 as its £179,000 ($286,000) a year chief executive in 2008.

Scott has been a senior sports adviser to the Government and his son, Giles, is one of GB's gold medal sailing prospects for 2012

So when further revelations came about some allegedly nefarious goings-on in the Premier League and the acquisition of the Olympic Stadium by West Ham you can bet the snigger and smirk became a deep belly laugh.

Pots and kettles probably were words not far from slippery Sepp's lips as the UK Parliament castigated FIFA, saying how "appalled" they were for not playing the game over England's World Cup bid, for suddenly, British sport doesn't appear as quite as squeaky clean as we would have the world believe.

Although well reported by insidethegames, and being headline news in Scotland, the Scott "scandal" has barely had a mention in the rest of the media - and I include radio and TV - which was far too preoccupied with creating false hopes of glory at Wimbledon and in Hamburg last weekend.

Commonwealth Games organisers have declined to give details of the "gift" in question but it is believed to be free tax advice worth thousands of pounds from a specialist company.

Rumours have been rife for some time about "sweeteners" being offered to Games officials and some politicians have accused organisers of the £524 million ($838 million) Games - two thirds of which is funded by the Scottish Government - of a cover-up. Shades of Delhi 2010?

Scott, 59, whom I have known for many years as a genuine sports enthusiast and accomplished administrator, acknowledges "an error of judgement" and unlike those involved in the FIFA corruption has immediately fallen on his sword.

But this won't stop Blatter and co from savouring a juicy slice of British sleaze, especially at a time when yet another Premiership club's foreign owner - Birmingham City's Carson Yeung - has been arrested in his Hong Kong homeland on suspicion of serious financial wrongdoing. Not the first Premiership club owner-magnate from overseas to make a joke of the "Fit and Proper Person" yardstick and probably not the last.

And what are we to make of this latest murky affair, allegations that Dionne Knight, a director of the Olympic Park Legacy Company, was paid more than £20,000 ($32,000) while moonlighting as a consultant for West Ham United, who subsequently were named as future tenants of the Olympic Stadium much to the ire of rival bidders Tottenham Hotspur.

Knight who is paid a salary of £84,000 ($135,000) by the taxpayer-funded OPLC is the girlfriend of West Ham director Ian Tomkins, who was said to be responsible for shaping the club's bid for the stadium and its conversion plans.

Knight and Tomkins (pictured) have been suspended by their respective employers pending an investigation of the claims, while West Ham vehemently insisting there has been no impropriety. They accuse Spurs of behaving "illegally" by using investigators to obtain what they say is "private information".

The matter is now in the hands of m'learned friends, with writs issued by West Ham against Spurs and The Sunday Times, who broke the story.

They maintain that any work done by Ms Knight was "transparent" and that the bidding process, in which she had no vote, was never compromised.

The OPLC have now announced an independent inquiry by a specialist forensic unit into the process by which West Ham became the preferred bidder and the nature of the consultancy work undertaken by Ms Knight.

All of which has led to a threat to London's attempt to host the 2017 World Athletics Championships at the venue as UK Athletics must lodge a formal bid by 1 September. Obviously any adverse publicity could count against them.

Oh dear, oh dear. Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble. What a witches' brew this is becoming.

The Government is said to be "alarmed" by the revelations, as well it should be, for even the merest hints of bungs and bribes in British sport will be music to FIFA's ears.

All this will only add to the long-held belief abroad that we are too smug for our own good. Not only smug, but blinkered in a belief that we have a divine right to win everything, on and off the playing field.

There was no better example of this than the hysteria surrounding Andy Murray and David Haye.

Never mind that he was only ranked fourth in the world, this was Murray's year to conquer Wimbledon, we were assured before his inevitable semi-final capitulation to Rafa Nadal.

Similarly, Haye, a pumped-up cruiserweight, would cut the erudite Ukrainian giant Wladimir Klitschko down to size.

But there was no harvest for the Hayemaker. He promised a blitzkrieg in Germany but meekly surrendered as one of the walking wounded, blaming a fractured little piggy.

What was going to be a great British double became a Lost Weekend.


The mood surrounding both futile attempts may not have been exactly xenophobic, but by jingo, it was certainly jingoistic.

Why do we Brits always seem to think we are a cut above the rest of the world?

Take the footy World Cup. England has been going to win it since 1966 and we haven't been good enough. And whenever we bid for it, we've lost. It's those dodgy foreigners up to their dirty tricks conspiring against us, you see.

The point is, we won't win anything while this aura of sniffy superiority, most of it, I have to admit, engendered by the media, continues to proliferate.

Mind you, I may sound a bit like that myself when I say I was the only British journalist to predict that Klitschko would beat Haye on points.

But I was astounded how many of my colleagues allowed logic to desert them and instead were swayed by Haye's tediously cocky verbosity.

Not only the pundits but the pros: Barry McGuigan, Duke McKenzie, Carl Froch, Amir Khan - all said Haye was a certainty.

McGuigan categorically assured me: "David will knock him out. No argument. I'd stake my house on it."

So, if his charming farmhouse residence in Kent has suddenly appeared on the market, we know why.

As it happens, boxers, like jockeys are notoriously bad judges of form (at ringside the former heavyweight champ George Foreman even scored the ludicrously lop-sided fight a draw).

Unfortunately, we have got carried away by what we perceived was the high and mighty state of many aspects of British sport.

But what has happened from Glasgow to Hamburg via Wimbledon, Hong Kong and Stratford should be a timely reality check.

On top of all this we now have the escalating phone hacking and police bungs scandal involving Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, the News of the World, a flagship of Rupert Murdoch's News International empire.

It was the 'Screws'' sister paper The Sunday Times which launched the UK media campaign alleging corruption within FIFA.

The biters bit? No wonder Blatter is beaming.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.