The Cottage is a part of me
Efter ett par månaders frånvaro är Crawford tillbaka med lite funderingar i arenafrågan
We all know football isn’t what it used to be. The game is no longer a leisure pursuit, but a business, more of an office job than a hobby. The fans are caught between worshipping their idols and campaigning to keep their history. That is the scenario now down at one of London’s sleepless giants, Fulham, where some of the friendliest football fans are suddenly bitterly divided over Mohamed Al Fayed’s indecision over the future of the club’s traditional home, Craven Cottage.
I remember what first attracted me to Craven Cottage as a four year-old. Some good friends whisked me away from the television and took me to see Fulham play Swansea. Here was I thinking football stadiums were always full and plastic and everybody sat down. My eyes were opened on that sunny afternoon, when I took my steps down the idyllic Thames walkway and strolled through the cheerful Stevenage Road. I sat in the Stevenage Road, only a matter of metres from the very Cottage that is now in jeopardy. It didn’t bother me that there was nobody there and that the Fulham fans seemed a peculiar bunch – I was hooked.
The great thing about Fulham in the old days was the football was of secondary importance. Of course, we cheered when the goals went in and booed when the boys didn’t seem proud to wear the shirt, but the congregation at the Hammersmith End were able to walk from place to place, skip from group to group to their heart’s content. It was more of a social occasion, catching up with friends for ninety minutes, then a matter of life and death. But that soon changed. I am not old enough to have vivid memories of Ernie Clay and Fulham Park Rangers, but I do remember writing to David Gummer (whose daughter Cordelia was the subject of some subtle lobbying during primary school classes) and enclosing a petition to beg for the sparing of our old ground.
To the outsider, Craven Cottage seems like a dilapidated old dump, with its ungainly towers of terracing and wooden seats on one side. To the educated, it becomes enchanting or "quaint" as Glenn Hoddle once famously described it, but to the Fulham fans it is simply home. We didn’t ask, as Chris Guard points out, to be playing for megabucks in the Premiership and enjoy a rollacoaster ride through the divisions with million-pound players strutting their stuff in front of celebrities like Michael Jackson. We would have been happy to stick with a fine young manager (Micky Adams, who together with his former assistant Alan Cork have called for a return to the Cottage) and his motley crew to entertain us on alternate Saturdays.
Mohamed Al Fayed, though, is not an evil man. He wants to be loved and bought into Fulham FC as a way of gaining some sort of bond with the supporters. That bond grew stronger as we chanted the name of the eccentric Egyptian, but it is now stretched to breaking point as we see the Cottage fading from the horizon. As one of his former employees, Paul Thorpe, pointed out at the public meeting, alienating Al Fayed will hasten our death rather than save us from it. He is writing a cheque for £2m a week to keep us afloat and he has to keep doing it. Somebody could persuade him, though, that Loftus Road is very nice, but it is cramped, with ugly blue plastic seating and there is no capacity for wandering up the terrace during the half. If seating would replace terracing back at the Cottage, I could live with it – but I couldn’t live with a team playing in Reading or sharing at Stamford Bridge.
And neither could the five hundred or so others who braved the hazardous snow last week to attend a public meeting on the future of the ground. Al Fayed wrote of a desire for the fans to "come up with a viable business plan" to return to the Cottage in the last match day programme – so what about bolting seats onto the terracing at a cost of nowhere near £100m? It has been done cheaply both at Hillsborough and Loftus Road and could avoid the planning obstacles that have dogged recent attempts at redevelopment.
A group of people I have lost respect for in the past month are the scare mongering hacks at the Guardian. With the authenticity of a few land registry records, Paul Kelso and Richard Williams decided to make a mountain out of a molehill, sprinkle a few quotes from the council and the Back To The Cottage fans movement that contradict the premise of their story and conclude that our idyllic ground will be sold for housing. This is ignoring the quotes in the article, from Andrew Slaughter (the leader of the Council, who provided some much-needed clarity at the public meeting), that the site is designated as a football facility and that any developers would have to prove beyond any doubt they could not find a suitable redevelopment plan for the ground. They also forgot that any housing development would need to be 80% affordable housing to give the not-so-well-off a chance to live in comfort.
Nobody is quite sure where Fulham would locate if the Cottage was sold (the Council has received no information from Fulham or the Land Registry indicating a sale). A long-term stay in Shepherd’s Bush is impractical, there are massive obstacles in the way of a groundshare at Stamford Bridge, Wood Lane would be a costly alternative and a move outside the borough would prompt the slow and undignified death of a great club.
These maybe uncertain times, both on the pitch and off it, with the players unsettled by our present ‘home’ down at QPR. Relegation is still a distinct possibility, with Bolton and West Brom perhaps beginning a revival in fortunes, but Steed can still halt that with a few right-footed blockbusters. We might be homeless, but the fans will fight that all the way and I might have the pleasure of welcoming my young neighbour from across the street to enjoy the company of the ‘Fulhamish’ folks, as Simon Morgan once dubbed us, down by the river.
Keep the Faith - FFC
