Ordinary heroes who stood in front of the bulldozers to save a cathedral of sport...

IN sport, not all heroes wear football boots. Not all heroes take seven wickets in the second innings of their Test debut, come from two sets down to win the Australian Open men’s final, or date Taylor Swift and break one of Jerry Rice’s most famous NFL records on the way to another appearance in the Super Bowl.

Sometimes, heroes live near Coventry. Sometimes, as the sad light of a January afternoon in the Midlands fades to dusk, they find themselves standing in the shadow of the derelict stadium they have spent much of the last seven years fighting to save, against all the odds.

The Coventry Stadium, just outside the village of Brandon, was once home to the Coventry Bees speedway team.

The greats of the sport, men such as Ole Olsen, called it their home track and it attracted 30,000 spectators for its biggest meetings. Opened in 1928, it was one of the favoured venues for British stock car racing, too.

That all ended on November 5, 2016, when the stadium staged its last stock car meeting and its new owners, property developers Brandon Estates, closed it and released plans for 137 homes to be built on the site, even though it is land designated for sporting use. All sorts of indignities have been visited upon it since.

Vandals have set fires in the grandstand. Some buildings are charred beyond recognition. Sections of the roof are blackened by the flames that threatened to engulf it. Every wall, interior and exterior, is defaced by graffiti.

Signs outside say ‘ Dangerous Buildings: No Entry’, not that anyone has taken any notice. They have been defaced by graffiti, too.

Travellers have set up camp here seven times in the last six years. They, and others, have stripped the grandstand of anything they consider of any value. All the windows are broken. A puppy was found abandoned in a cupboard and taken to a rescue centre.

It seemed as if it were only a matter of time before the developers got their way. The more the stadium was allowed to decay, the more often it was attacked, the deeper its ruin, the more thorough its desecration, the more likely it seemed that the developers would win, almost by default.

But the men who stood in front of the ruins of the stadium last week, wandering through a car park overgrown with weeds and grass, point-blank refused to give up. They fought and they fought. They formed the Save Coventry Speedway and Stox Campaign Group (SCS) and devoted all they had to saving the stadium.

I’m a stadium nerd. Sports stadiums such as the Coventry Stadium live and breathe, as far as I’m concerned. You might think they’re mute but they tell stories, hold memories and bind families through generations. They are part of our cultural heritage and should be protected with way more care than they are.

Our sports stadiums should be heritage sites. They have as much cultural value as a concert hall or a theatre. For large sections of the population, they are our concert halls, theatres and our cathedrals, too.

Yet places such as the Baseball Ground in Derby, Maine Road in Manchester, the Boleyn Ground in east London, the Dell in Southampton and the Vetch Field in Swansea are allowed to be swallowed up and obliterated. Only Highbury, Arsenal’s former home, has been given the respect and protection it deserved.

SO sometimes it takes men such as Jeff Davies and Dave Rowe to stand up for the cathedrals of British sport instead and place themselves in front of the bulldozers.

Jeff was Coventry Bees’ club photographer for 34 years, he came here as a child, he saw the joy it brought close up and refused to let it go.

He estimates that since the developers took possession of the stadium on January 1, 2017, he has made 240 visits to document its treatment in pictures and to try to protect it from interlopers. He and Dave and other members of the committee have ploughed their own money into the campaign to save it.

‘I was brought here as a baby by my family,’ says Jeff, ‘and I have been coming here ever since. You think of riders you watched over the years as a kid growing up.

‘Riders like Ole Olsen, world champions racing for the club, and Greg Hancock in the late Nineties. The ashes of one of our greatest riders, Nigel Boocock, are interred beneath the track.

‘A stadium is like music, it brings back memories. When you listen to music, it takes you back in time and that’s what it does for me. I am an old man now, but I would love to see the stadium reinstated and brought back to life for speedway and stock cars for the young kids of today to enjoy it in the way I did.’

Dave mentions music, too. In the same way Everton play Z-Cars every time the team runs out at Goodison Park, each meeting at Brandon began with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee blasting out from the sound system at the stadium. Each meeting ended with Andy Williams singing May Each Day.

So Jeff and Dave, who is the British Speedway press officer, and Dave Carter, a planning consultant whose expertise has been invaluable, plus the other members of the nine-strong SCS committee have never given up. And to their delight, others have flocked to the cause.

When they needed to raise £20,000 to pay for a barrister to represent them on the latest stage of the legal struggles against the developers, more than 500 supporters raised the money in less than a week.

And earlier this month, after Rugby Borough Council, to their everlasting credit, refused to buckle in the face of pressure from the developers, Brandon Estates suffered their most significant defeat yet when an appeal over their failure to secure planning permission to build the homes on the site was dismissed by government planning inspector Helen Hockenhull.

In her written judgment, Ms Hockenhull said: ‘Whilst speedway has declined to the extent that it is now a minority sport, I do not consider it is dying. The same is true for stock car racing. There is demand for Coventry Stadium, demonstrated by SCS and supporters in the racing community.’

So Jeff, Dave, the SCS committee, the speedway community and the stock car fraternity are all winning. They have not won yet, but Brandon Estates and their owners appear to have been defeated in their plans to demolish the stadium. It is hoped they will sell up. There is no shortage of people interested in buying the stadium back.

And so, there is at least hope. If there were to be a sale in the next six months, and even if spectators could only be housed along the back straight to begin with while damage to the grandstand is assessed and repairs are carried out, Jeff and Dave believe speedway could even be back at the Coventry Stadium by March 2025.

It is still a dream and the owners may refuse to sell. Big obstacles litter the way forward.

But otherwise ordinary men such as Jeff Davies and Dave Rowe share at least a few things with Jannik Sinner, Travis Kelce and Tom Hartley.

They are made of the right stuff, the stuff that makes sporting dreams come true.