Lessons to learn from Douglas Park
new football grounds need to get the balance right
Published:
POOR Steven Gerrard. As if he wasn’t having a bad enough time of it trying to stay in peak condition on Southport police’s leftover turkey, every newspaper, television channel and radio station in the country was simultaneously advertising the fact that he wasn’t going to be in for at least 24 hours.
Given the Liverpool squad’s record on home security, it is likely he got back to find little more than the foundations where his house used to be.
But even that would be more than is left of Douglas Park since last the Dons were in this part of the country.
Turn your back for 20 years and they go and build a shop on it. The demolition of their former ground has allowed Accies to do more than reset a nine-match home losing run against Aberdeen stretching back 55 years.
While very little goes on underneath the stands of Pittodrie save for the occasional bit of interior redesign courtesy of Heart of Midlothian, lurking within the bowels of New Douglas Park are several departments of South Lanarkshire Council. Of course, if they are anything like Aberdeen City Council, that’s still no guarantee there’s anything happening, but at least it meant there was a line-painting machine on hand and shows the sort of joined-up thinking absent in a city which has a six-acre facility in the centre of town sitting virtually unusable for all but 19 afternoons a year.
If only AFC had thought of such cohabitation before Marischal College came up for sale. Perhaps, the council would have been more pro-active in the search for a new site if it meant escaping the horrors of St Nicholas House.
But anyone casting envious glances at New Douglas Park should beware. However hot things get in the Spice Of Life Stand, the atmosphere will always go off the boil due to the gaping hole behind the opposite goal.
The balance between necessity and requirement is one which modern football architecture gets horribly wrong.
Chris Crighton is editor of Dons fanzine the Red Final
