On another New Year’s Eve, the best part of a decade ago, modern Britain’s greatest folly was taking shape. Its long cantilevered arms, tipped with red lights, stretched out to the night sky. At its centre hung a delicate latticework structure, weightless and elegant. Two years to the day away from its opening, and seen at midnight from a deserted and rain-swept East London side street, the Millennium Dome would never look as beautiful again.
We all know what happened next. Conceived in confusion and executed in haste, the Dome turned out to be a £750-million symbol of the vanity of leaders who wanted to put on a big show without having to bother their heads about the little matter of substance. Even before its disastrous opening it was seen as a national embarrassment.
Driving out to look at the new Wembley Stadium as another year comes around, very different emotions are engaged. The sheer uselessness of the Dome was apparent even before the contractors covered its framework with that bland white canopy. At the Wembley site the half-built stadium lacks the pure aesthetic quality of the incomplete Dome; the sense of purpose, however, is unmistakable.
Possessing neither the expertise of a civil engineer nor an insight into the industrial relations practices of the construction industry, and inclined to treat the forecasts issued by interested parties with profound scepticism, I have no idea whether the 130 days that remain between now and the date of the FA Cup final on May 13 are sufficient to complete the jobs of connecting the 2 618 lavatories to the London Borough of Brent’s sewage system or stocking the 688 ”catering outlets”.
All I can say is that from the outside it doesn’t look as though the big kick-off can be all that far away. And the cool blue lighting that already illuminates the arches of the new Wembley Stadium tube station in the hours of darkness, echoing the 133m signature arch of the stadium itself, looks like a sign of hope.
If the builders don’t make it in time for the Cup final — and since the main contractors are likely to lose millions on the project, their motivation may be in question — then they will have another 16 days in which to avoid an even bigger humiliation.
For, by inviting Hungary to become the first international side to play in the new stadium, the Football Association has lodged a hostage to fortune. Anything other than success, on and off the pitch, will be taken as a bad omen for Wembley and for England.
Hungary occupy a unique place in the history of English football. It was 52 years ago last November that Ferenc Puskas and his teammates arrived at the old Wembley and became the first team from outside the British isles to beat the game’s inventors on their home territory.
If their shattering 6-3 victory sent English football into a prolonged fit of introspection, their arrival had been the product of enlightened thinking on the part of Stanley Rous, then the secretary of the FA. The least xenophobic of football administrators (and later to become the president of Fifa), Rous was anxious to see how England would get on against the pre-eminent team in world football.
Given the present state of the game in Hungary, it seems unlikely that the visitors on May 30 will be capable of inducing a similar trauma, despite England’s extremely patchy record in friendly matches under Sven-Goran Eriksson. Currently lying 74th in Fifa’s world rankings, sandwiched between Kuwait and Cuba, the descendants of the Magical Magyars should provide just the sort of undemanding opposition Eriksson’s players will welcome before packing their bags for Germany.
Like the Dome, the new Wembley was born of chaos, uncertainty and indecision. Even after the old twin towers had come down, there was a time when it seemed as though the entire project was in jeopardy. The decision to drive it forward is turning out to have been a brave and far-sighted one.
During a tour of its perimeter at the start of the new year, the stadium’s vast cost began to make slightly better sense.
At an all-in figure of £757-million, which is to say a mere £7-million more than the estimated cost of the Dome, the bill for the new Wembley will be around three times that of Stade de France — a huge margin, even allowing for eight years’ worth of inflation. Despite its success in hosting the 1998 World Cup and the athletics world championships of 2003, however, Stade de France is not a place that encourages tourists to pay a visit when nothing is going on.
Even in the old days, Wembley offered a worthwhile tour for visitors, who could marvel at dressing-room facilities that appeared to have been unchanged since the year of the white horse. Covering an area something like five times larger, and with a vast concourse, the new arena has the potential to become a much greater attraction. Given the sort of imaginative thinking that was never applied to the Dome, and a few decent performances under Eriksson or his successor, it should quickly establish itself in the life of the nation.
But the real reward for success is even greater. Once open for business, Wembley will provide a symbol of real achievement to encourage those members of the London Olympic organising committee whose job is to fulfil the promises contained in the 2012 bid document. And compared with their task, building the new Wembley may come to seem like putting up a garden shed. — Â