OUR thoughts this week go out to Martin Tidd, the UK director of Multiplex,
who announced as long ago as May 2005 that he would be watching this year’s
FA Cup Final in the new Wembley Stadium. “I can absolutely guarantee that
the FA Cup will be held at Wembley,” Tidd said, “and I can absolutely
confirm that my seat is there and I’ll be sat there.”
But that was before the FA anticipated, reasonably enough, that the cranes
might get in the way and decided to stage the final in Cardiff. A quiet
afternoon lies ahead for Tidd on May 13, then — apart from the noise of
drilling and banging, of course. On the plus side, though, I’m sure some of
the builders will have the radio on, enabling him to keep up with the game.
And parking should be a doddle.
In the months after Tidd made his bold declaration, optimism on the likelihood
of a Wembley FA Cup Final in 2006 quickly evaporated. By this week, it was
the construction industry’s worst-kept secret. Paddy Power, the bookmaker,
closed its book on the matter after only two days, having allegedly noticed
(and this was surely the spot of the year) “men in hard hats placing big
bets in the Wembley area”. Superb stuff. Some of the people Multiplex were
backing to get the job done were, apparently, backing themselves not to.
I’m looking forward to the episode of Bob the Builder in which
Bob, Scoop and Dizzy pop into Ladbrokes to have a crafty fiver on themselves
at 9-4 not to complete in time the underpass designed to spare the local
hedgehog family. In the aim of disabusing our children, once and for all,
about what the world of contract building is really like, this episode must
surely come.
Even so, the FA’s announcement prompted in the papers much tutting and
derision and open accusations of bungling, most of it written by people
whose experience of big construction projects is limited to putting up a
shelf — or probably, to be more specific, to failing to get round to it.
What is really surprising, surely, about the Wembley delays is that anybody is
surprised. As anyone who has extended their kitchen knows only too well, all
builders’ estimates are, to an important extent, an act of creative writing
and each of them is to be taken with a pinch of salt — or, more
specifically, with half a hundredweight of salt, due for delivery on
Thursday but delayed until Tuesday afternoon on account of a problem with
the suppliers.
True, few of us see our kitchens, like Wembley, go over budget by more than
£400 million, even if we end up going with a more expensive tile than we had
intended to and have to get someone back to sort out the plumbing. But it’s
just a question of proportion and a builder’s estimate doesn’t suddenly
start having a firm foundation in reality simply because he happens to be
constructing a football ground. Where do you suppose the expression “ a
ballpark figure” came from, if not from man’s timeless experience of
building sports stadiums? (I’m not sure this is true, actually. But it
sounds good.)
Accordingly, I don’t go with the people beating up the FA for its part in “the
Wembley fiasco”. On the contrary, the FA seems to me to have played a fairly
tidy game. The staggering £180 million lost by Multiplex on the Wembley
project includes £14 million of penalties paid to the FA for delay. So this
was a fixed-price contract with all liability for lateness and overspend
passed on directly to the contractor. Go out now and propose a similar
arrangement to the builder working on your kitchen extension and then stand
back as the tea ejaculates, in a gale of derisive laughter, from his nose.
Also, as great planning disasters of our time go, the new Wembley barely
measures on the meter. For truly award-winning budget-busting and positively
Olympian errors of time management, you’ve got to hand it to the British
Library — ten years late and costing £511 million, as opposed to the £32
million predicted. Alternatively, consider the Scottish Assembly building in
Edinburgh, which, when it finally opened, three years off schedule, had cost
£431 million, a more than tenfold increase on the original budget. By these
standards, the new Wembley is cheap and on time.
In any case, I may not have been alone in finding the notion of “rushing to
complete” a 90,000-seat sports stadium a faintly worrying one. Call me
overcautious, but if I am going to be joining that quantity of people in a
newly built football ground, I would like to be able to reassure myself that
a suitable period has passed for “snagging”. I would prefer to think that
the seats, staircases and toilet facilities, among other things, have been
bolted on properly, rather than by some hyped-up screwdriver jockey who
managed to get 9-1 with William Hill that he could finish the job by
Wednesday.
Remember the Millennium Bridge in London? It swayed because its designers had
not adequately wondered about what would happen if people ever walked on it.
Well, that’s “rushing to complete” in a nutshell.
I want to be as confident as possible that the stand I’m sitting in isn’t
going to start bouncing in sympathy the first time more than 50 people jump
up and down inside it in unison. And if that means a delayed opening and a
few more million down the pan for Multiplex, then I’m with the FA in saying,
“So be it”.
So it’s going to be another five weeks or so late. So the FA Cup Final can’t
be in London this year. So Jon Bon Jovi is going to have to wait a bit
before he gets to say “Hello, Wembley” in a pair of unfeasibly tight
trousers. So what? The new national stadium, by all accounts, will be a
thing of wonder, an arena to match any in the world and a sports and
rock’n’roll mecca in which no unforeseen expense has been spared.
In the meantime, the Cup finalists and their followers must set up camp once
again in the glorious Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, which cannot really be
labelled a hardship. Incidentally, it is normally the Millennium Stadium
that gets a mention when noses are being thumbed in the direction of the new
Wembley. But let’s not forget that Laing, the contractor on the Millennium
Stadium, lost £26 million on the project because of an overspend. That ’s
building, folks.
Which team has the useless sods now?
CONGRATULATIONS to Chelsea’s groundstaff for the top-class quality of the
pitch they produced for Wednesday night’s Champions League tie. No, really.
True, it had earth where grass might have been more aesthetically pleasing
from a television point of view. But in terms of the way the ball rolled,
the Stamford Bridge pitch played like a snooker table, suitable both for
Chelsea’s quick-passing game and for the long-ball style of play favoured on
the night by an increasingly under-pressure Barcelona.
Let’s hope the surface at the Nou Camp for the second leg can come somewhere
near it for quality and that the rumour that Barcelona are “growing the
grass” specifically to thwart Chelsea proves, like so much of the wind
around this unhelpfully controversy-loaded fixture, without content.
A bargain price for taunting your rivals
LIKE Gary Neville, I was shocked at the fine handed down by the FA’s
disciplinary commission in the matter of his fan-baiting victory dance. Only
£5,000 for that? As Neville wrote on Manchester United’s website: “I ask the
authorities, where is football being taken?” Towards a world, clearly, where
groin-thrusting and badge-kissing in the direction of the opposition’s
supporters are meekly accommodated. Shame.
