Where was their chairman, Geoff Thompson, when the flak was flying last week? I understand he was not at the meeting when Crozier persuaded members of the executive board to pull the plug. Thompson is so low-profile he is becoming known in football as The Invisible Man.Moreover, the relationship between football and Downing Street is by no means as cosy as it used to be since England’s failure to acquire the World Cup for 2006. Recently Tony Blair has been annoyed by the unsubtle demands of certain leading figures in the game for the removal of Kate Hoey after the election and the appointment of a more “football- friendly” Minister for Sport.This is unlikely to happen. Indeed, in return for stumping up a considerable amount of Treasury funding for a more realistic Wembley Stadium, the Government may well demand more involvement by reactivating the idea of installing a regulator to check some of the excesses of a game which certain ministers believe has got too big for its boots.While it is true that Stadium Australia, in Sydney, and Stade de France, in Paris, were substantially government-funded, in both cases they were purpose-built for big events: the Olympics and the World Cup finals respectively. Now, in an attempt to repair the damage done by what has become the classic sporting cock-up of our time, a final attempt will be made to rescue and restore Wembley. For whatever spin is put on it, the inescapable fact is that London remains the only major sports-playing capital in the world without a national stadium worthy of the name.Jarvis Astaire, then the deputy chairman of Wembley, said at the time of the sale that it would all end in tears It certainly hasn’t ended in tiers Not a brick has been laid. All the guilty parties involved have been too busy dropping them..

Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Football Association, has warned that the Millennium Stadium is in effect on trial at this Saturday’s FA Cup final. Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Football Association, has warned that the Millennium Stadium is in effect on trial at this Saturday’s FA Cup final.
The new stadium was first used as a Wembley replacement for the Worthington Cup final. There were transport complaints from fans, and the pitch has had to be relaid for the Arsenal-Liverpool final at the weekend.”Everyone knows the problems to do with the pitch and traffic,” Crozier said. “We’ve done a lot of work with Cardiff and hopefully it will be a great occasion, but we’ll take a view about how it’s worked after the final and decide whether to still hold the match there.”The agreement with Cardiff is for three years but the FA can withdraw if they give the Welsh nine months’ notice.Meanwhile, Crozier has accepted that the FA deserve the flak they have received since the collapse of the New Wembley project but insisted they had made a “professional” decision to pull out of financing the redevelopment. Neither the FA nor the Government were willing to underwrite the £400m loan needed but Crozier believes there is still a future for the Wembley scheme. He wants to see a united push to turn that into reality and called for all sides to join together to find a solution rather than point the finger of blame.”Wembley Stadium is not the Millennium Dome Mark II. The organisers of the Dome built the thing and then came crying for help.

We have taken action precisely to avoid that sort of expensive mistake. We have done the professional and responsible thing by stopping and admitting that we have a problem before work has begun. The stark alternative was to risk bankrupting a not-for-profit organisation that has been in existence for more than 100 years.”The FA have rejected a report that they are secretly considering plans to turn Wembley into a giant shopping mall.Crozier claimed that the England players prefer going on the road for internationals. “They will tell you they have loved the atmosphere at Villa Park and Anfield,” he said “It’s been a success. I know the players feel strongly on this but others rightly feel that England is the home of football And the home of football ought to have a home. In an ideal world, both the FA and Government would prefer a national stadium.”.

Just under three years ago, Wembley Stadium’s twin towers were condemned to demolition when Norman Foster’s design for a new national stadium was accepted. A huge triumphal arch of steel and cables was to take the place of these last symbols of Britain’s old football empire. Last week, the towers were still standing, looking down on the rotting stands and the sea of mud that used to be the pitch, the turf having been auctioned off to “nostalgists” last year. Now the towers resemble nothing more than the legendary camel created by a committee that was trying to design a horse, after the humiliating collapse of the Football Association’s proposed development.When the news finally broke last Tuesday, the word used was “fiasco”. But it is less a classic British cock-up than a very British failure of nerve.
The predictable mud-slinging and back-stabbing following the FA’s announcement that the project had stalled seemed to include most of the participants. Ken Bates, until February the operating chairman of the project, was quick to blame everybody, accusing in particular the Sports minister, Kate Hoey, for interfering with the stadium’s design, and therefore its profitability.

“They should shoot her,” he suggested helpfully.Equally, since Bates, as chairman of Chelsea Football Club, has a long track record as a one-man committee, there were plenty of accusations that his abrasive style had helped to scupper the deal. There was stick for the Government, too, not just in the shape of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, but also for the “hands-off” approach it claimed to be taking ­ remember “government has no role to play in visitor attractions” Tony Blair ­ when the reality was altogether different.From 1995, when John Major sanctioned the national stadium project, through to Labour’s £120m lottery grant that allowed the FA to buy the Wembley site in March 1998, government has kept a hand on proceedings. It wanted the project to work and then to bask in reflected glory. But it didn’t want to get too close in case another “Dome” loomed.