English and French player partners have booked Banana Island, a luxury spot 25 minutes by ferry from Doha Beach, according to the venue’s sales manager. Those with children have their eyes on the larger chalets that sleep five. Benefits include a helipad if they prefer it to the engine launch, with white leather seats, free dates and cold jerseys. These £6,000-a-night chalets, built on stilts perched on the Arabian Sea, won’t offer a total escape from the hoi polloi. Anyone can catch the boat and pay £100 to enjoy the resort’s pool and beach. But with a cinema, a surf pool with a wave machine and scuba diving lessons, it all probably contributes to the feeling that England’s partners are way ahead of the rest when it comes to finding accommodation for the B team. This is the luxury setting where England’s partners will stay in Qatar for the World Cup The sea chalets will provide a picturesque setting for WAGs attending the tournament England team-mates Kieran Trippier, Jordan Pickford and Harry Maguire go to Qatar. Gareth Southgate’s players got arguably the best base of the lot, eschewing the traffic and high rises of Doha for the handsome class of a hotel converted from a former pearl fisherman’s chalet, with thick, heat-resistant walls, in the traditional souk district of Al Wakra. , coast from Doha. There will be no newspaper pictures of Harry Kane, Raheem Sterling and Co on an inflatable unicorn in this place. They have never installed a pool there because they want to preserve its status as a “heritage property” – a holdover from the days just 70 years ago, before their lucrative oil and gas boom when Qatar was just a little sand on the edge of the Arabian Sea. But the five-star Tivoli Hotel, built on the beach, will keep it real for Southgate’s players. They’ll wake up to see the ancient wooden beams of what were once cottages overhead and watch camels pass by if they decide to eat at a number of beachfront restaurants a few minutes’ walk from their rooms. The old bazaar market is adjacent to the hotel with a fleet of gold carts to visit the gold and bird markets. Southgate will be pleased to know that hotel staff are doing the driving. The England team will avoid Doha and stay at the swish five-star Tivoli Hotel The hotel will be closed from the end of October to prepare to welcome the team, so there will no longer be a separate dining room for hookah smokers. Complex work to clean the mosaic tiles in the communal fountain where players can relax was seen by Sportsmail last week. The most expensive rooms here typically cost £250 a night. It felt a lot less last-minute than the scene surrounding the recently completed Welsh group hotel on the West Bay palate, which is not yet open and is in the middle of a construction site. The Delta City Center Hotel is fully furnished and is half an hour’s drive east of the Ahmed bin Ali Stadium, where Wales have the advantage of playing all their group games. But if there is no speedy completion of construction work, players will be greeted by excavators, dug roads and sidewalks as they settle into the glass skyscraper. Sportsmail last week found a makeshift security hut in the center of a construction site between the hotel and the seafront Corniche, with a lone employee there. Gareth Southgate hopes the cool, calm base chosen by England will help his players relax The USA team, also in England’s group, has the most luxurious residence – the Marsa Malaz Kempinski – although they will have to share it with the residents. It’s too big to close the whole place for them. The Americans can draw on the psychological boost of knowing they are playing on the green, green grass of home. The turf for all World Cup stadiums comes from the state of Georgia. “American grass seed gives you a firmer playing surface,” Aspire Turf’s David Graham, who is responsible for the Qatar 2022 pitches, told ESPN. “With the climate and conditions in Qatar, the playing surface it could not be sustained without the proper seed of the grass.’ The existing playing surfaces were removed two weeks ago and the new seed laid, with water piped under courts around the clock to ensure the optimum growing temperature. Playing temperatures are unlikely to be an issue due to the decision to move the tournament to November, which generally brings gray skies, sunny spells and top temperatures of around 23°C (73°F). Unicorns will not respawn as there is no pool installed at their base But sophisticated air conditioning systems, designed at a time when it looked like the tournament would be played in a June heatwave, are also in place to ensure on-court temperatures are regulated for the players. Underground sensors that measure heat and humidity will allow for that degree of control, along with courtside vents calibrated to blast blasts of air that won’t be felt by players arriving to make throws. Air vents at seat level will also ensure fans can watch matches at 21-22°C. Managers may find their media duties slightly less onerous given that, for the first time, all pre-match press conferences will be held at the same venue, at the luxury Pearl resort north of central Doha. Some players will make their feelings known about the human rights abuses that have occurred throughout this. The human cost will always hurt the competition that is about to unfold. It is impossible to reflect on the feats of architecture and engineering that went into building the courts and hotels without remembering the immigrants who toiled to build them and the roads, bridges and heat-swept creeks before returning to dirty, cold accommodation complexes. Many died. Both Harry Kane and his wife will enjoy a luxurious stay over the winter Most workers will be gone by government order during the tournament, although gardeners and cleaning staff are expected to remain. The sight of them paving pavements and watering grass on the Corniche in the scorching late afternoon heat two weeks ago was a reminder of the toil. The Qataris are hesitant about this. At a hastily arranged press conference to mark the opening of the Lusail stadium, they insisted their country had been misrepresented and said there was no human rights problem. The notoriously opaque Home Office is not used to having to answer questions about anything unpleasant. When we tried to ask officials at the press conference about security, they told us they hadn’t heard what we had asked, but as we tried to repeat the question, the next one was under consideration. On Banana Island, where the cinema and bowling alley were gearing up for the WAGs last week, no one will be the wiser about the real pain the migrant workers have gone through. England go into this year’s World Cup in Qatar as one of the favorites to lift the trophy
