Friday, 21 December 2007
Sites for sore eyes
It's a decade and a half since Town first made plans for a new stadium. The council has now given up and said several times "yes, alright, build the thing – just stop bothering us!" But at no point have the supporters been given a chance to tell our club what we think the Fentydome should be like.
The location and overall design of the stadium seem finalised. We can't afford anything nicer than a cheap shed, exactly the same as Shrewsbury's and Doncaster's and every bugger else's, and we can't build it anywhere other than Great Coates because there's no other set of local residents we want to annoy more.
But there are other considerations in the overall matchday experience (leaving aside the actual quality of the football). It must still be possible to enjoy a match at an ugly, sterile ground in a barren post-industrial wilderness; otherwise Scunthorpe's attendances would be even lower.
So let's see the fans get some say on what goes inside the ground. And Mr Fenty could probably use our help, preoccupied as he has been with many other concerns. Only this week Ofcom threw out his complaints against Radio Humberside's coverage of their dispute with the club over broadcasting rights. Some might add that if any organisation deserves a reprimand from a communications watchdog, it must be the one that boasted its new stadium would offer "synergies with Europarc" and then proudly urged fans to go to its brand new website and "check it our".
In January last year the club launched a spectacular multimedia website at www.gtfcnewstadium.co.uk, where the theme from Star Wars launched visitors into a breathtaking 3D virtual reality tour of the ground. I'm absolutely sure they must have paid the copyright holder all the rights and performance fees for the music; it's just a shame that they seem to have forgotten to renew the web address when it expired on 29 November, because visitors to the site now are met with a flat and empty expanse of grey – much like the scene that will greet visitors to the site for the new stadium, in fact.
This just leaves the other new stadium website at extra-gtfc.co.uk/newstadium – where we discover a ringing endorsement for the project from the team manager. "I have seen the blueprint and I think it is superb and ideally located just off the A180. It is so accessible and a lot of thought seems to have gone into it," says Russell Slade.
If the Fentydome is to be anything other than appalling, Town must invite suggestions from the people who have to use it. And then the club must prove to be a lot better at building and maintaining stadiums than they are at building and maintaining websites.
The location and overall design of the stadium seem finalised. We can't afford anything nicer than a cheap shed, exactly the same as Shrewsbury's and Doncaster's and every bugger else's, and we can't build it anywhere other than Great Coates because there's no other set of local residents we want to annoy more.
But there are other considerations in the overall matchday experience (leaving aside the actual quality of the football). It must still be possible to enjoy a match at an ugly, sterile ground in a barren post-industrial wilderness; otherwise Scunthorpe's attendances would be even lower.
So let's see the fans get some say on what goes inside the ground. And Mr Fenty could probably use our help, preoccupied as he has been with many other concerns. Only this week Ofcom threw out his complaints against Radio Humberside's coverage of their dispute with the club over broadcasting rights. Some might add that if any organisation deserves a reprimand from a communications watchdog, it must be the one that boasted its new stadium would offer "synergies with Europarc" and then proudly urged fans to go to its brand new website and "check it our".
In January last year the club launched a spectacular multimedia website at www.gtfcnewstadium.co.uk, where the theme from Star Wars launched visitors into a breathtaking 3D virtual reality tour of the ground. I'm absolutely sure they must have paid the copyright holder all the rights and performance fees for the music; it's just a shame that they seem to have forgotten to renew the web address when it expired on 29 November, because visitors to the site now are met with a flat and empty expanse of grey – much like the scene that will greet visitors to the site for the new stadium, in fact.
This just leaves the other new stadium website at extra-gtfc.co.uk/newstadium – where we discover a ringing endorsement for the project from the team manager. "I have seen the blueprint and I think it is superb and ideally located just off the A180. It is so accessible and a lot of thought seems to have gone into it," says Russell Slade.
If the Fentydome is to be anything other than appalling, Town must invite suggestions from the people who have to use it. And then the club must prove to be a lot better at building and maintaining stadiums than they are at building and maintaining websites.
Labels: communications, doncaster, fentydome, internet, new stadiums, radio, scunthorpe, shrewsbury, slade, websites
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