Alun Thorne: A grand day out – for Gary
Mar 12 2010 By Alun Thorne
Listening to a radio phone-in in the car outside Wembley after Villa had succumbed to Manchester United in the Carling Cup Final, one caller particularly stuck in my mind.
Gary – I believe that’s what everyone who calls radio phone-ins are named – was a Villa fan stuck in traffic outside the stadium. He just called in to say that he was disappointed that his team had lost but he’d had a brilliant day.
This was at 7.30pm, more than two hours after the medals had been handed out, and Gary was still sat at a standstill outside the ground. As were we.
There is obviously a good deal to be said about positive thinking but as we sat at 45 degrees in a multi-storey car-park in the shadow of the new Bobby Moore statue and about to perspire from diesel fumes, I couldn’t help but blame Gary and his like for our predicament.
When it was announced almost a decade ago that Wembley had come to the end of its natural life, there was an upsurge of support to build any new national stadium outside of the capital.
For years football fans whose team had reached a cup final or England fans following the national side had hacked their way through North-west London for the opportunity to see their team play in one of the world’s great sporting arenas. The view might have been impaired, the catering abysmal and the seats may have given you piles but Wembley was Wembley – win, lose or draw, it was a day out to cherish.
But despite the thrill when at the ground, the overall experience was inevitably impaired by the sheer nightmare of actually trying to get to and from the ground.
Seizing the opportunity, Birmingham threw its cards on the table and submitted a business case for a new national stadium to be built at the NEC – an initiative backed by the this newspaper with its ‘Bring it to Brum’ campaign.
Sat at the heart of a motorway network that disappears to all four corners of England, the NEC’s cause was championed by fans up and down the country who were losing the will to live in Harrow on the Hill as they tried to get home.
Looking back, it is difficult to know quite how close Birmingham came to success. Certainly the Government made all the right noises about looking at the options seriously.
Businessman Patrick Carter was appointed by Jack Straw to examine the options and in the end – one has to think inevitably – the decision was made that the Wembley name was too sacred to lose to upstarts north of Watford Gap.
One of the main concerns at the time was that corporate hospitality would play a major part in funding the new scheme and corporates apparently don’t like to leave the capital. Today’s reality is that it is probably as quick to get to Birmingham from the centre of London as it is to get to Wembley and any new high speed rail network of the future will transform Birmingham into a bona fide suburb of the capital.
The reality in the end was that the Government and the Football Association understood very well that football fans will put up with pretty much anything. They could have easily have build the new national stadium in Truro and still expected 80,000 for every game.
On the same phone-in a number of Villa fans called to complain that thousands of Utd fans had not even hung around after the final whistle to see their team lift the cup. Considering that was their 34th trophy under Sir Alex Ferguson and they are perennial visitors to Wembley, they were clearly well aware of what awaited them when they got back to their cars.
The new stadium is certainly a wonderful thing but it is terribly let down by the infrastructure that supports it. That said, if we do manage to beat Chelsea on April 10 I might just change my name to Gary.
