When Wycombe Wanderers picked up their chairs in 1990 and re-located from Loakes Park, just underneath the windows of Wycombe Hospital, to the very dead-end of Hillbottom Road, the club made one good decision; keep it simple – two ends, two sides.

Despite building a main stand that looms disproportionately over the ground beneath the Chiltern Hills, the beech trees and the watchful eye of Red Kites, the club still has a home end. It has a terrace for standing and enough space for a bit of moving around when its cold in that old chalk pit. The new home end has a roof that helps send out the singing and chants into the Buckinghamshire skies. It is not a very big home end, but it is a home end.

Quite a few new football grounds have appeared on the outskirts of towns in the last few years, some better than others. In the past month I have been to two that have provoked argument about whether new grounds are better than our home at Fratton Park.

The first thing I noticed in walking around the outside of the two stadiums was how much space is taken up by the new stadia. At the Ricoh Arena, home to Wasps Rugby Football Club and Coventry City FC, (tenants listed by size of average attendance), I suspect that the footprint of this facility is close to three times the size of the playing surface. The development includes hotel and conference facilities, a vast array of catering options, an indoor sports hall with a 12,000 capacity (that is also used for gigs and shows), and a casino. Football is a sideline.

The casino is an interesting element. During Pompey’s visit on 2nd October, a fellow supporter said, “Everyone was in the casino.”  (which raises concerns about his ability to count and also makes him an ideal candidate for the Black Jack table). Personally I am totally against such places. Money takes enough sweat to earn, so why chuck it away when you could spend it on a Pompey home game?

Inside the Coventry complex, behind neon signs and towering cliffs of plastic cladding is a football pitch and seating for crowds in excess of 32,000. When talk turns to visualising an ideal ground, (a regular topic in the queues for loos at Fratton Park, or the cosy crush in the South Stand Upper concourse), capacity is often discussed, along with sight-lines and toilet queues and drains.

The space behind the stands at the Ricoh Arena is impressive. The choice of Pompey videos to entertain visitors at the bars was thoughtful, the toilet queue non-existent. Overall not an unpleasant setting to visit. I also thought that the angle of the stand, (it seemed quite steep), helped The Blue Army produce a great sound that evening. So what was the problem?

The problem was trying to spot the home fans, (“Ultras” as Palace fans like to say in their sophisticated South London way). Where were the home fans?

As it turned out the home fans were located to the right of Pompey section and so had no chance of making any dent in the Pompey Wall of Sound. The other end of the ground was taken up by a vast empty shrine to the late Jimmy Hill with no-one but ball boys in attendance. It was left to visitors from Portsmouth to bring our own atmosphere and help entertain the locals.

So here’s the problem; in a more rounded stadium, where do home fans gather? How is the atmosphere built, sustained and maintained? Fratton Park can be an intimidating prospect for visiting teams, but could we keep that if we were to ever move?

I was working down the road just the other day. It was a match day and walking around that plastic stadium I was again struck at how much space a new ground takes up. This one, opened in 2001 it has at least two major flaws (some might say 30,000 flaws, but we’ll discuss that another time).

The first issue is that it is laid out from goal to goal on an East – West line.  With the sun low in the sky the Northam End, where visiting fans are placed, can be bathed in blinding sunlight. Many Pompey fans will remember a ridiculous mid-winter sunny midday kickoff when it was impossible to see what was happening for much of our 0-3 defeat (thankfully). When building an open-air sports facility, make sure to check where the sun is during the winter football season, i.e. usually low in the sky and following a rough east-west trajectory.

The second problem is the lack of an end for the home fans and the subsequent loss of atmosphere. At the Chapel End there is the family section with all its weird cartoon characters, (in addition to children’s entertainment and clowns dressed up as mascots).  This family section is as far away as possible from visiting supporters so they are less likely to witness any off-putting scenes close up, such as Pompey fans celebrating spectacular last minute goals. (Click link for gratuitous You Tube clip of a random David Norris effort).

So if the family section takes up much of one end, do the Ultras spread out into the stands or, do they have to compete for an end with their guests? When I say compete, I mean try to out-sing, out-chant; the kind of thing that builds an atmosphere.

As Pompey fans most of us will have only ever been at this particular ground when 27,000 people are united in their bilious hatred of 3,000 of us, but on normal match days the atmosphere is very different. The crowd only unites and makes a bit of noise when things are going well – just like White Hart Lane. Besides the obvious, why is this? I think it’s because no one knows where the home end is; there is none. Without a concentrated end of fans doing all the blind-faith things they do we could be reduced to plastic clappers (as Sc*m have used), goal music (Urgh! Wolves?) or blokes with loudspeakers (any French Ligue 1 ground) to try and get the fans going.

This is a problem created by poor ground design. Too many new grounds have been  developed with money making in mind and not football as a priority. I believe that our friends from the USA see this is a major challenge in developing better facilities for Pompey fans. Pompey has to be a sustainable venture financially, operating competitively, but it will mean nothing if we become another Bolton Wanderers who play their games in an empty, soul-less concrete bowl out of reach of the local town, near the motorway, with reduced gates and little to shout about.

So if you have a bit of money to spend on a new home, yes, make sure that there is enough space, but absolutely definitely, without fail, make sure that there is a home end, none of this half-baked good site lines, nice catering, decent toilets, lovely hotel and a casino nonsense. Those are the extras, not what makes supporting Pompey so special.

CLP  08/10/2018