- Feb 16, 2004
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- 826
I agree with you that the new stadium will be ready for the Liverpool game.The premier league is run by the chairmen. Scudamore serves at their grace. Due to ffp and the premier leagues short term cost controls in conjunction with the tv money balooning, many clubs are now making healthy profits and are looking to increase capacity in their stadiums. I doubt those chairmen would be happy by making a precedent of deducting points from a team whose build over ran as they could find themselves in a similar position further down the road.
I think we should be fine. The stadium may not be finished but i think it should be able to hold the liverpool game.
Where I disagree with you, and it seems half a dozen others, who thought my original reply was funny, is two-fold.
Firstly your original comment implied that there would be little the EPL could do if the deadline of the Liverpool was not met: "Are they going to waggle their finger at us and strike us from their xmas card list?" There is a lot they could do including fines and/or points deductions.
Admittedly, your second comment changed this to an assertion that member clubs would not want to penalise the club in these circumstances, because some may wish to enhance their own grounds in the future, and if this were the first delay I would agree with you. But you are ignoring the crucial fact that the EPL and its constituent clubs already bent over backwards in relaxing their regulations in order to allow the Club to play a game at Wembley. This occurred a mere two months before the start of the season, when the development had been planned for over a decade and been under construction for three years. It would not have been too difficult, I'd suggest, to get permission for more than one game at Wembley, if the need for this were any sort of concern.
In these circumstances, for the Club to go back to the PL within a few weeks and say "Sorreeeee. Slight miscalculation there. We're going to need a couple more games at Wembley. Yes, we know that the away clubs will already have booked their hotels, put tickets on sale, and made travel arrangements for the team and fans, but hey, life's a bitch at times." I don't think that would go down too well.
Now, as it happens, I think it's a moot point.
For Daniel Levy and his team to display such a smug, cavalier, hubristic and incompetent attitude towards the Club's responsibilities and its fellow EPL members, would go against the whole ethos of excellence they have been creating and implementing over the last nigh-on two decades, and I would be amazed if it happened. Subject to totally unforeseen massive Acts of God (or Allah), the timescales will in my view be met.