One vote. One lousy, miserable, solitary vote.

That's all that Australian football has to show for years of work, untold thousands of man hours, intensive lobbying and schmoozing of FIFA officials, a $45 million taxpayer-funded bid, a Phil Noyce-produced film and the investment of so much passion in this World Cup project by so many at the Football Federation of Australia.

All for what? Just one vote.

What a shambolic exercise in futility. Questions will now be asked, and answers demanded. How could we have got it so wrong? How could our lobbying attempts have failed so abysmally to hit the mark? (And how, as a side issue, was Al-Jazeera television able to announce Qatar's victory at 3.40pm - 50 minutes before Sepp Blatter opened his envelope and broadcast the 'news' to the world?)

Even rank outsider Japan won three votes to leave Team Australia packing its bags and heading on its way after just one round of voting.

The FFA, led by Ben Buckley and chairman Frank Lowy, was convinced it had five votes in the bag, certainly enough to take it past the first two rounds of bidding. And once it got to the last three bidding cities, and into a contest with the US and Qatar, well then anything was possible.

Yet it received just one vote from these 22 men from FIFA whose job it is to award host-city rights.

So either the Australian delegation badly misread the signals that were coming their way, or they were duped. Which is a polite way of saying they were lied to.

Germany's Franz Beckenbauer was said to be one delegate firmly behind the Australia bid. Or was he? Perhaps we'll never know.

This is a shadowy world, as we know, where backs are scratched, deals are made and favours are promised. And where money talks. And the Qataris, awash as they are with oil money, have enough of the stuff to shout from the rooftops.

It is no time for sour grapes - congratulations to the minnow Middle East nation and let's hope their Cup is a success. But it is time for answers.

What was it about the Qatar bid that so impressed the FIFA delegates? Where was the appeal in a country that has no footballing tradition to speak of, no stadia, was regarded as 'high risk' by one FIFA report and boasts searing summer temperatures that at one stage forced talk of building stadia underground? Not to mention the cultural issues which frown on alcohol consumption and women dressing 'immodestly'.

And what was it about the Australian bid that was so on the nose? It can't just have been Noyce's six-minute video about a Cup-thieving cartoon kangaroo.

By standing astride east and west, and being positioned half-way between the traditional football powerhouse of Europe, and the huge developing markets in Asia, Qatar was able to appeal to both sets of delegates. And, in the context of all-important television rights, and the billions of dollars they generate, it was also an attractive proposition to TV networks in both Europe and Asia. Certainly more attractive to Europe than Australia ever could have been.

So in the end it did come down to money. But, more than that, it came down to the language of diplomacy and deal-making and how Australia, in that important regard, never came close to being fluent.