Every Wednesday in the Herald Express, our Torquay United correspondent Richard Hughes takes a sideways look at what's going on in the World of the Gulls. But this week, he is on holiday, so former Herald Express reporter Guy Henderson is given the pen, and he takes a look at the new stadium 'plans'.
It was probably the timing of news that Torquay United and Torbay Council had met to discuss the club’s new stadium plans that was the most surprising. The issue of moving the Gulls from Plainmoor to a new stadium has been divisive for the club’s fans and the local community, to say the least.
It has been more than five years since owner Clarke Osborne wowed a meeting of the then-Mayor’s public forum with a computer-generated video showing how the new stadium would host not only league football but also big-name entertainment events. It all looked very impressive, but it all ended up on a shelf somewhere.
Mr Osborne re-stated the intention to move to a new home in a recent online ‘forum’ event. To choose this particular moment to reopen the debate - at a time when the relationship between the club and a sizeable section of its fans is fractured, to say the least - is a surprise.
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A day or two before the trip to Worthing a press announcement emerged from Plainmoor to say that directors had held an ‘informal and private briefing’ with members and senior officers of the council, explaining how a proposed new stadium would benefit the community as well as the club. No decisions were expected or made, but the club’s representatives emerged ‘hugely excited’.
If the club had been surfing a huge wave of popular support at the moment, on an unstoppable trajectory back towards the sunlit uplands of the Football League, it might have been a good time to meet the council and talk about a move. But right now it very much isn’t.
In more than 50 years of supporting Torquay United - from the Ministand, the Pop Side, the press box and now the Pop Side again - I have never known such a disconnect between club and its fans as the one we are currently seeing. Even in the early Eighties - generally accepted as having been the worst of times - it wasn’t like this.
Those who chant abuse at the manager and the owner from the terraces when things are not going well remain a small but vociferous minority. But the elephant in the stadium is that a growing number of fans who would never dream of hurling abuse are feeling a growing sense of discontent. And it is hard to imagine that the club’s management and directors do not share in that sense of discontent, too.
Something about Torquay United Football Club is broken right now, a breakage that has been coming ever since some hotly disputed refereeing on one awful afternoon at a play-off final at Ashton Gate changed our course. Since then, as one clever soul on social media borrowed from Tennyson, we have sunk half a league, half a league, half a league downwards in successive seasons ever since.
The charge into football’s own Valley of Death needs to be reversed, and quickly. So is now the right time to be talking up a move to a new stadium?
Where would it be, for a start? Nobody is talking publicly about that, but the original Nightingale Park proposal appears to be a dead duck, as the old landfill tip site has already been earmarked for a solar farm.
Where else? Kingskerswell maybe, or Edginswell, or a little site somewhere off the ring road where there is plenty of land that could be re-purposed.
And what then of Plainmoor? A new swimming pool and leisure centre to be shared with the school next door? And won’t that need some housing development alongside to help it pay its way? Shots in the dark, all of them.
Torbay MP Kevin Foster has some words of warning for the club in his latest weekly update for residents. He was living and working in Coventry when the Sky Blues left Highfield Road in what turned out to be an extremely ill-fated new stadium project.
Our MP points out that Torquay United’s original 2018 stadium plans ‘did not stand up to even the most basic scrutiny’, and his understanding of last week’s meeting was that the council gave the club a polite hearing, but nothing else.
The council’s leadership has, he says, stressed that the freehold on Plainmoor is not for sale. The MP says he retains a ‘healthy scepticism’ over any new stadium plans, given how quickly the last ones fell to pieces. He also underlines how important it is that the fans’ views are heard.
He concludes: “Any new stadium plan must be based on realistic business plans, not just optimism and shiny graphics.”
If the plans are taken forward, the club has assured supporters that there will be a full public consultation, and the planning process will be just the same as that for any other local development.
Watch this space.
- Richard Hughes is on holiday and will return next week.
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