Don’t bulldoze Old Trafford. You can’t rip up the sacred turf where Duncan Edwards once walked
THE irresistible allure of the new is currently drenching Manchester United and, as the case for leaving Old Trafford seems to gather momentum, you can just picture the next glossy instalments in the story and the accompanying headlines they will bring.
An artist’s impression of the stands and concourses at a new stadium. The image of Jim Ratcliffe standing with a shovel at the sod-cutting ceremony. The sense it will create of one of the world’s greatest football clubs being back on the up. ‘The Wembley of the North,’ they’re already calling it.
For Jim, already restoring the muscularity, ambition and vision which have been scandalously absent during United’s grim Glazer years, a new stadium would also represent a personal legacy. Something to mark his custodianship by, for all time. Perhaps thoughts of how you will be remembered are more acute when you buy into a club at the grand age of 71.
So maybe this might be the appropriate time to offer up the view that it is success on the field — only that — for which Ratcliffe will be revered, if only he can restore it to this club.
The timeframe Ratcliffe set for knocking Liverpool and Manchester City ‘off their perch’, as he put it in his impeccably articulate and well-judged first discussion of United’s future last week, was three years. That’s a very tall order and the monumental distraction of building a new stadium from scratch will only detract from it.
Please don’t let the talk of a shiny new stadium blind anyone to the reality of what happened when two other British football institutions, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur, packed up and left old ones behind.
It wasn’t just a seeming need to sell every decent player to Manchester City, to meet the stadium debt payments, which drained Arsenal as they stumbled through a decade of upheaval after leaving Highbury in 2006.
The picture Arsene Wenger paints of those 10 years reveals how the Emirates stadium project sapped time and thought and became the overwhelming concern, even when there was Wembley, 15 miles down the road, to move into. ‘The project and I were interconnected,’ Wenger wrote in his memoir.
It was the same at Tottenham, where the immense complexities of overseeing a billion-pound construction project became the club’s overriding obsession, draining energy and executive headspace to the exclusion of much else for two years.
Neither of those clubs had any choice. Both were playing in stadiums so small that staying would have made them commercially uncompetitive.
But United do have a choice. Their stadium capacity is 74,000. Expanding the South Stand, which carries Bobby Charlton’s name, and filling in the corners would take it up to 90,000. Wembley of the North? It already exists.
IT WILL be no easy task to properly future-proof a stadium which the Glazers have allowed to fall so far below the standard. There will be a need for new concourses, extra hospitality facilities and vastly superior kitchens in a new South Stand, plus the fiendish logistical conundrum of extending it up and over the adjacent railway line as a second tier is added. The asbestos-lined rabbit warren of corridors must be stripped away. But Real Madrid’s sublime rebuild of the Bernabeu shows you can get to something modern in a stadium where past glories played out. The Bernabeu has been radically and imaginatively updated, yet its bowl — and the sacred pitch — are exactly the same.
The same can apply to Old Trafford. Build up the South Stand, add a new concourse, create a lucrative hospitality offer, place a roof across the top of that and it is fit for purpose.
There is much more to do beyond that. Any temptation to improve the South Stand and leave the rest of the stadium would still maroon United in the past, where the dull, uninterested Glazers have left them.
Pro rata, the longer, slower process of modernising the entire stadium, stand by stand, might outstrip the expense of building a new one. But the argument for this longer, slower process is so compelling. United may not even need to leave Old Trafford during the process.
To leave or to remain is an argument on which no clear majority view yet seems to prevail. The internet preference, broadly speaking, is ‘leave’. But more of the regular stadium-goers are ‘remain’. That’s because — contrary to those ubiquitous images of rain flooding down from the South Stand sloping roof — Old Trafford is not falling down.
Those who actually watch United play there, week on week, speak of the atmosphere and visibility; a superior match-going experience to the homogenous modern football bowl.
AND then, if you will forgive the sentimentality, there is the history. It counts for something that the South Stand carries Bobby’s name. It counts for something that Duncan Edwards walked the turf on which the latest generation are cheered each week. It counts for something that there is an indelible link of supporters stretching back down through the generations.
Barcelona, another club with United’s kind of history, have also needed to provide a stadium for the modern age. And where will they be playing when that effort is complete? The Nou Camp.
A friend who holds a United season ticket this week sent me an image of Old Trafford, illuminated for a night match, with the last golden colours of sunset on the horizon behind it. I thought it was beautiful. A reminder of all United hold dear.
Don’t knock it down. Don’t rip up the turf where Duncan Edwards once ran his race.
IT WAS the most beautiful throwback when Finn Russell walked up the stadium steps at Murrayfield to receive the Calcutta Cup on Saturday. Who, among the visionaries governing sport, decided that players leaping up and down on hastily assembled plastic platforms was a better way to receive a cup? WHAT a watch the rugby league World Club Challenge was, on the BBC. Wigan Warriors coach Matt Peet, whose side beat Australia’s Penrith Panthers, adds the trophy to the Challenge Cup, League Leaders’ Shield, Grand Final and another World Club Challenge in two and a half years. Peet is 39, never played professionally and is one of the standout English coaches in any sport. I ARRIVED only this weekend at an obituary for Mike Procter, the South African cricketer, who died earlier this month, learning of a fearsome bowler and swashbuckling batter who was never bitter about the lost opportunity when his nation was excluded from Test cricket because of its government’s apartheid politics. ‘Yes, I lost a Test career but what is a Test career compared with the suffering of 40million people?’ Procter later reflected. I don’t hold to the view that those in sport must speak out on any matter but what a statement it would be if one of the Israel national football team took inspiration from Procter’s example and spoke for the dispossessed and bereaved of Gaza, when they play their Euros play-off against Iceland next month.
YOUR stories of touchline support, as parents and grandparents, continue to take unexpected courses. After last week’s tale of a father watching his three boys finally appear in the same football team, Anthony Lockwood talks of playing in the same cricket team as his twin sons, Nick and Jay — only to then find them picked for the opposition team in a fixture known as the President’s Cup, at Pavenham, North Bedfordshire. The inevitable happened. Anthony relates how, as he strolled out at No 10, the opposition captain ‘manipulated the bowling so Nick was piling it down at me’. And it was over within seconds. ‘A Lockwood ct. J Lockwood b. N Lockwood 0. The best one liner in our scorebook history,’ Anthony says.