A sign of things to come…
June 13, 2010 7 Comments
It’s been a quiet weekend domestically with the focus being solely on South Africa and the World Cup. I think it’s been a fairly low key start to the World Cup. There haven’t been many goals and some of the games I’ve seen have been pretty poor. As usual, England didn’t set the world alight against the USA and in the end they paid the price for a goalkeeping mistake by Robert Green. It could have been worse in the second half when the USA striker Findley embarrassed Carragher and nearly put his nation ahead. England should win their next two games, although I expect them to be found out in the latter stages.
As for Boro, it’s the calmness before the storm in some ways as this week will be a very busy one. The club are hosting a fans forum tomorrow night where both Graham Westley and Phil Wallace will be in attendance and they will be answering supporters’ questions from 7.00pm. The Broadhall Suite and bar opens from 6.15pm. After that there is the Carling Cup draw on Wednesday morning. It will be the first time ever that Stevenage will enter the draw and I’m personally hoping for a big away tie against the likes of Portsmouth, Reading or Ipswich.
Thursday is the big day really as the fixture lists for the 2009/2010 season are released. The fixture release day always gets me in the mood for the new season. It’s the time where we start to plan all those away trips to the likes of Burton, Bury and Bradford. I’m hoping the opening game to be an away fixture. Somewhere like Torquay or Morecambe or Lincoln would be good.
Talking about League 2 grounds and while on a trip up in Derbyshire this weekend, I popped over to Chesterfield to see how their new stadium is taking shape. The B2Net Stadium is located off the A61 and is next to a huge, new Tesco store. Here are a few pictures;
The stadium has a 10,338 capacity and will be all seated. It replaces Chesterfield’s former home at Saltergate, which was a run down ground in the centre of the town. The stadium has cost approximately £13m to build, but some of this has been paid by Tesco, who have built one of their new stores adjacent to the stadium. There will also be a hotel, KFC and petrol station on the same complex.
Away fans will be situated in the Printability (North) Stand which is where these pictures were taken from. When I walked around the stadium, it looks like most modern stadiums. There is a fair sized car park around all stands and can be easily accessed from the A61. The exterior of the ground is finished off well with high quality brickwork and it seems that the club haven’t cut any corners when it comes to presentation. It will look really quite nice when it is fully completed.
Who knows, it could be Boro that are Chesterfield’s first opponents at their new home? We will know on Thursday.
Regarding the World Cup so far, although only a few games have been played there has only been one or two games that I have found exciting and interesting to watch; England vs USA yesterday and Germany vs Australia last night although it was very one-sided in the latter. England did play well and I think the USA were always going to be competitive and difficult to break down, Rob Green’s error was the only real piece of action he had in the first half and in the second half he made amends with a terrific save under pressure from Findley after Carragher’s lazy lack of marking. England dropped two points there in my view, having had many good chances to score a winner in the second half that just weren’t finished properly, Rooney had a quiet night and although Gerrard and Heskey were first-class we still missed Rooney’s scoring boots!
Germany are always big favourites to do well at World Cups, I expected them to go far before the tournament kicked off and after watching them thrash Australia last night they’ve only justified my reasoning. Never write off the Germans in a World Cup tournament, always a well-organised, strong side with lots of quality in their squad particularly up front. They attack games from the start and defend solidly, only sides like England, Spain and Argentina will be good enough to break them down in this tournament I feel. My top four for this World Cup are England, the Netherlands, Germany and Argentina and three of those that have played so far have shown good promise of doing well. The Dutch are highly underrated by many in my opinion, a fantastic record of form through qualifying, they have lots of good quality players and have looked to be one of the best sides coming into the tournament including warm-up games.
Regarding the Carling Cup draw and 2010/11 League fixture list release this week, I too would like an away first round match at a big team like Reading, Ipswich, Norwich or Pompey. In terms of our League 2 fixtures, in some ways I would like a big opening fixture against a top team in the division, but another part of me would prefer a slightly lesser quality side to start against because I would love to kick-off our Football League adventure with a good win! I feel that we could beat any of the teams in the bottom half of last season’s table, anyone above 10th place would be a good challenge.
Gillingham or Barnet to start with would be a big game to kick-off the season!
I’ve been saying for a while that Carragher is a few yards off the pace, I was wrong, he’s totally past it! Capello must be really desperate to have persuaded him to come back to the fold, an indication of the shallow depth of quality this England team actually have, don’t get me wrong, it’s not just Carragher, several players don’t look comfortable on the world stage. I saw England at a very reasonable 8/1 for winning the World Cup, I would put them more at 80/1.
I agree about Carragher, I don’t think he’s any more interested in being back in the England squad than he was when he retired from International football originally. I think he used to be a solid and decent centre-back but in the last two or three years has lost his shine and is a shadow of the player he once was. For Liverpool he’s been average as was that whole team last season, I don’t think Carragher wants to be at the World Cup and his 45 minutes against the USA showed that he is uninterested and past it in terms of quality.
I think it’s one of Capello’s first real big mistakes taking Carragher in that squad to South Africa, I’d have taken Tom Huddlestone instead or included Dawson in the 23-man squad in the first place instead of Carragher. I hope Capello picks Dawson for the replacement centre-back now instead, he’s younger, fitter, faster and just much better in quality than the Scouse ponce!
Chesterfield fan here – first things first – congratulations on your well deserved promotion to the Football League. Given the success of Morecambe and Exeter you must feel some confidence for the coming season.
I’m glad you liked our new ground and i hope you are looking forward to your first visit. Just a correction for your article re Tesco – they haven’t paid for or contributed to the b2net in any way shape or form, and given there’s a possibility they might get a bit annoyed about any suggestons they did, it’s probably worth just pointing that out.
All the best for next season; i’ll definitely be at your place in October.
Oh right, I heard that they had helped fund part of the new site. It’s a bit strange that they have moved just opposite considering the store there before was perfectly fine?
I’m looking forward to visiting the new stadium. I visited Saltergate a couple of times and that was always good. Best luck for the new season.
Cheers.
It’s a bit complicated but the developer who bought the glassworks site had to split it up as the council were insisting a football ground had to go on it somewhere, and CFC couldn’t (and didn’t need to) buy it all. In a nutshell what happened was that by getting Tesco to buy their part of the site for their new supermarket, the developer was able to give CFC our part of the site for nothing.
You’re right about it them moving over the road being a bit strange. But apparently there is a reasonably simple explanation. They leased rather than owned their old site, and wanted to own a bigger store. There’s a rumour doing the rounds that the car park for the old store might be being rented by CFC as additional matchday parking.
Anyway, as with all new grounds i’m sure you’ll see good and bad points. It’s not as close to the Town Centre as Saltergate, but there are loads of good (and some not so good!) pubs and chippys nearby and it’s not flung out in the middle of a field somewhere.
Yeah I know the area quite well as I lived up that way (South Normanton) for a couple of years. I like Chesterfield and am looking forward to the trip up there after Christmas. The old ground had a lot of character, but when I used to park outside the main stand to go into the town, you could tell it needed hauling down.
The new one should be fine, but it won’t feel like home for a while yet.