watch tHe skies

Today I was lucky to be invited to watch Arsenal versus Aston Villa at the beautiful Emirates Stadium. The first Premiership game at this venue ended in a disappointing 1-1 draw, considering that Villa spent most of the game playing a somewhat defensive 11-0-0 formation, whilst Arsenal seemed bent on walking the ball in to the net instead of having a go like normal teams.

Moan aside, the stadium is a thing of beauty. The best description I can think of is to say “Carlsberg don’t do Stadiums, but if they did, it would be the Emirates Stadium”. British readers will get that, for the rest of you, you are probably wondering why I care so much about a soccer stadium. Oh well.

What puzzles me greatly is that Arsenal have turned this stadium in on time and to their £300m budget. That budget includes completely relocating a recycling plant and turning Highbury in to executive apartments. And yet only a few miles away, Wembley remains a shell and may not now be ready in time for the cup final this year. That and the spiralling cost of around a billion pounds and it makes you wonder how a project can go so awry…

With a capacity of 60,000 and probably the only stadium with a dog toilet, it is easily the best stadium in the premiership, and I was spoilt further by spending the pre-match warm up in a nicely decorated box, with free beer, salmon and cream cheese bagels and our own attendant seemingly keen to get us all as drunk as possible. Check out the thumbnails for a couple of photos of the ground I sneaked on to my phone in between Kronenburgs, and head over to the Arsenal website if you would like to know more about the ground, and to question my statement about dog toilets… Here’s to a successful new era for the Arse at the new ground… Come on!

I also took the opportunity to visit Highbury (their home for some eighty years), and it was odd to see such a legendary ground boarded up. Still, you cannot let tradition get in the way of progress, and it is nice to know that in the new ground you will get a good view of the game no matter where your seat is.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 19th, 2006 at 11:33 pm and is filed under sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.