World Cup
We qualified for the World Cup again then. I’m sure I’m not alone in looking forward to the spectacle of the worlds best single sport tournament. Its never straight forward for us English though is it (note for foreign readers: usually we enter such things as Great Britain or United Kingdom, but the world cup is entered as our seperate countries); everytime a big competition comes up someone is injured or some bizarre circumstance comes up (Moore almost couldn’t play in the 1966 World Cup as he didn’t have a contract with any club in the English league! In the end he signed a 1 month contract with West Ham just before the start of the tournament!). This time its the injury of the striker most people had pinned their hopes on: One Wayne Rooney. Of course it is a blow but if we don’t have a chance without him then we didn’t have a chance with him. One player doesn’t make a team and Owens record is a good one when it comes to top games.
Anyway, I’m kind of veering away from what I was going to write today. It was more about the state of large scale building/engineering projects in Britain these days. I was wondering if we’re the only team going to the world cup who don’t have a national stadium. If not, are we the only team that didn’t have one last time either? In fact they’ve been planning to pull it down and build a new one since about 1995 (when did they actually start digging up the pitch and knocking the old one down?) How on earth can it take so long, cost so much, and still not be ready on time? Who decides which contractors get the job? Do we just have a bidding system and give it to the cheapest? Next time we want a stadium or a Dome or something I think I’ll bid a few thousand quid and tell them it’ll be ready in a couple of months. Then 5 or 10 years later I can claim the final cost of one billion dollars and apologise for it being late and retire to a little island somewhere. And if you tink a billion dollars is just a joke I took from an Austin Powers film then you’d be right; the actual cost is nearer to $1.5b (almost £800m at the last estimate I saw).
Frankly I’d have been happy for them to spend that much on a stadium and infrastructure if everyone was being honest up front. Why not just have a fund used entirely for large projects designed mainly to make Britains feel proud of their country again rather than for someone to make money. Once upon a time we could manage to dig the best canals, build the best bridges, design and build a supersonic passenger plane (a feat that no other country or countries - we had better credit the French a little here - have managed). Now we only build things that we think are economically viable, paying foreign invewtors and companies at the same time, and fail even with that goal.
Is it just me?