Brighton and Hove Albion - Falmer Stadium

Building The Future

25th August 2009

The cynics said we couldn’t afford it (me included)
The cynics said it would never happen (me included).

Well, how wrong we were. I’ve just got back from the Falmer site, and my god, it looks good. If it wasn’t against about a million health and safety regulations, I’d start playing there on Saturday. All of a sudden, the letters, the flowers, the shit cd, the protests down at the sea front, the protest at Wycombe, the more sodding letters, the Play-Off Final banners, the Dick Knight & Martin Perry snoozathons at half time and countless other campaigns appear to have been more than justified.

It is actually bloody brilliant. I advise you got go and have a look if you haven’t already.
To be honest, I was expecting to see bugger all really, but thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and hit the Uni library as well as having a look around.

You can just about see the top of the roof as the train arrives (travelling Southbound) which I imagine will wet the appetite of many on matchdays for years to come.

It’s a disgrace that it’s taken so long for the building to start though. Get off the train and all you can hear is the traffic from the road. Natural beauty my arse.

Walking up from the Uni, you can see the top of the stand that has been erected (I think it is the East?) and it already looks bigger than the current South Stand at Withdean. Sadly though, it seemed as though my plans to see all the work that has been done was going to be scuppered by a big bastard of a blue fence around the construction site.

Fortunately, that proved not to be the case. Incredibly, the club (or more likely, the constructors) have actually had the brains to realise that there would be visitors to the site, so have put in prison-style windows in the big blue fence. Brilliant! People have already bent the bars of course, allowing for a few pictures to be taken on my phone, as you can see. If I was a bit braver, I probably could have got quite far in the site before being thrown out – there were only a few people floating about by the entrance.

As I departed, another fan turned up in a Goldstone RIP t-shirt to have a look. How apt.

All in all, it looks fan-bloody-tastic I think. I'm already looking forward to a special edition of Crocs on Tour there when it opens.

Never has an Arnie cliché been more appropriate.

I’ll be back.

Mark