Hammers should forget Olympic dreams

As I sat on London’s Docklands Light Railway and my train trundled through the heart of Stratford’s soon-to-be Olympic Park this week, it struck me how unbelievably difficult it is to not be inspired by the forthcoming London Olympics.

The train wobbled it’s way past the impressive aquatics centre, before offering passengers a close up view of the Olympic Stadium – already close to completion despite the games not due to start for another two years. Both structures are enormous, and just beyond them you can also make out the velodrome – again, pretty much ready and waiting for Chris Hoy et al to don their Lycra outfits and use it to take a leisurely ride around.

But aside from the hugely impressive new arenas being built, anyone taking the DLR on that route between Stratford and Canary Wharf will get a sense of just what an enormous transformation is taking place in East London, and what the potential opportunities for British sport could result from it. The sheer size of the site is enough to drop jaws.

How on earth have they found a patch of land in an inner London borough, big enough to build an Olympic Park? Somehow, miles and miles of what was essentially wasteland have been found in a corner of East London, and it’s now being put into good use at a rapid rate.

To see one of the country’s most deprived areas benefit from such large scale regeneration must certainly be seen as positive. At the very least, even the most ardent of sceptics would surely agree that putting such a vast plain of derelict land into some kind of use is beneficial to the area? Well, you would imagine so, but there are plenty of those who believe the London Olympics will be a “glorified sports day” or to put it more crudely, “a waste of money”.

In defence of the project – which seems such an inadequate word for a development of this size – Government ministers and officials from leading sports organisations have muttered the word “legacy”. Ah “legacy”, the golden word that can put all arguments to bed without the speaker ever having to know what it means – a little like George Osborne robotically repeating the phrase “we are all in this together”. But to really make sure the London Olympics is not a glorified sports day, it’s true that a lasting legacy must be left behind.

Football has not always caught the public’s imagination as an Olympic sport, mainly because the rules mean squads are made mostly from players aged under 23 and therefore many of the game’s top stars do not appear.

However, it certainly looks like football will have a role to play in the legacy of the London Olympics. Organisations are currently working on bids to secure the use of the stadium post-Olympics. My own team West Ham has expressed an interest in making it their home – forming a partnership with Newham Council to ensure the “community interests” box is ticked. Leyton Orient has thrown its name into the hat as well.

Out of the all the options being put forward, retaining the stadium solely for the use of athletics is looking less and less like the most viable – despite it being the one promised to the IOC as part of London’s “legacy”. Doing this would mean reducing the stadium’s capacity from 80,000 to under 30,000, which seems a missed opportunity, and also a bit of a waste of time. I imagine if I’d worked on any part of the stadium that could be considered “the section between 30,000 and 80,000” I’d be a little miffed to find they had tore my handy work down like an irate customer unhappy with the plumbing at his new house.

At the same time, I don’t want to see West Ham move to the Olympic Stadium whatever its capacity – especially since Karen Brady floated the idea of changing our name to “Olympic West Ham”. “Olympic West Ham” – seriously? It sounds like a dodgy travel agent on Barking Road rather than a football club.

But despite the prospect of a name change making us the laughing stock of England, I don’t want the club to move to the new stadium because I simply don’t want to leave our current home. I realise this makes me sound like a difficult child who despite the assurances of his parents, fails to see the benefits of moving from his current house to a shinier bigger one a little further out of town.

The problem is, I’ve grown up at Upton Park and for all its failings – only getting a scoreboard five years ago, horrendous queues for the station after the game, nowhere to park, less than beautiful surroundings – it’s our home. It’s been the site of both the sublime and the ridiculous, often in the same match. The grass has been graced by the likes of Moore, Hurst, Brooking and Di Canio, and less impressively so; Steve Jones, Robbie Stockdale and Allen McKnight. I’ve witnessed good West Ham teams, bad West Ham teams there and bloody awful West Ham teams there. And like most other West Ham fans (and to the annoyance of those who don’t like clichés), I’ve experienced the extraordinary atmosphere that the crowd conjures up when games of significance are played “under lights”.

The Davids have promised that a move to the new stadium will ensure we have the cheapest tickets in the Premier League, and are able to bring in the revenue that will propel us to being regular participants in the Champions League. That all sounds great, but let’s be honest; it’s not going to happen. This is West Ham after all. We’re never going to play in the Champions League, and there’s even less likelihood of our tickets being the cheapest in the Premier League. If there is a way of making something financially unviable, West Ham will find it.

My gut instinct though, is that the Davids and Brady will find a way of pushing the deal through. It may be many years before we are there, but I do expect West Ham to be playing their home games at the Olympic Stadium before the decade is out. What they will do with Upton Park doesn’t bear thinking about.

Moving home and moving leagues

I’ve been missing in action of late – stranded in some unknown corner of the blogosphere with no way of knowing how to get home.

The stress of moving home and following a team embroiled in a relegation battle is the admittedly weak excuse I will use for the lack of column inches produced for CBM in recent weeks.

If the truth be told, I should have seen it coming. We are now in what is officially know as the “business end” of the season – having apparently sailed through the “charity beginning” and “public sector middle” to get here – so given West Ham’s traumatic season so far, I should have predicted that more drama and stress was afoot.

In some ways, moving home and negotiating your way through the business end of the season are very similar. You know that you should really be excited, but all you can see are numerous obstacles preventing you from completing your task and ultimately, you just want it to all be over one way or another.

Having finally unpacked the last of what seemed like 250 bags and boxes of possessions, I can now turn my full attention to tearing my hair out at West Ham’s so far impotent attempts to stay in the Premier League.

Our recent 3-1 home defeat was “earned” thanks to as bad a performance as I can remember: not just from West Ham, but of any team, of any age, competing in any sport. As we trudged out of the ground on that cold Tuesday evening, many of us were of the opinion that the players must be actively trying to get us relegated. That was genuinely the most rational of explanations we could come up with.

But just as families sat down to celebrate Easter last weekend, West Ham finally started fighting fro their Premier League lives. The point achieved at Everton on Sunday afternoon was done so with the kind of battling display that is usually only ever produced by one man in a claret and blue shirt – Scott Parker.

Unfortunately, Parker’s battling qualities saw him pick up a tenth booking of the season, and as a result he will now miss two of our five remaining games. So we head into the business end of the season with our best account executive out of the office, and unable to attend important meetings with the Sunderland and Liverpool branches.

Even after Sunday’s performance has offered us a glimmer of hope, I still feel like I just want it all to be over now – even if that means being relegated. I’m basically not comfortable with West Ham being involved in games where the stakes are high, or in fact, anywhere above low-to-medium. I’d much rather these high pressure games be the sole preserve of the like of Manchester United, Chelsea and those other strange clubs that start the season genuinely expecting to win something.

I always feel West Ham are much more at home just for want of a better phrase, mucking about. At school, we would be the bright kid who talks too much. The one who produces one beautifully written essay out of four and could be in the top set if he applied himself a little better.

Unfortunately, it now looks like every one of our five remaining games will be tight, tense affairs. This weekend, West Ham fans will face the depressing prospect of paying close attention to the result of a fixture between Hull City and Burnley. Ten years ago, if someone had told me the result of such a game could affect West Ham’s league position, I would have assumed that some awful financial scandal had seen us demoted two divisions. Actually, Sheffield United are probably still campaigning for that to happen.

But West Ham’s saving grace is that Hull and Burnley are so bad that we will probably only need to avoid defeat in three of the five games to stay up. In fact, Hull and Burnley’s combined ineptitude will probably seem them both somehow emerge from Saturday’s game with no points.

If West Ham play anything like they did against Wolves a couple of weeks ago, we may need that to actually happen. And if it does? Well, it will at least all be over and I can look forward to away trips to Blackpool and Scunthorpe.