Wake Up!

Just watched the Norn Iron Sweden game on TV last night and suddenly had a 'brainstorm' about the 'new' National Stadium, or should I say the new on/off National stadium. Let's be honest here, the proposed 'maze' stadium hasn't got a pups chance of ever coming to fruition. Never mind the impracticalities of the scheme, Soccer, Rugby and Gaelic games under one roof, but would somebody tell me where the hell are we going to get the 44,000 fans to fill it? Norn Iron has a population of less than 2 million, of that only about 10% have any interest in football (sorry soccer) and about 90% of them are armchair supporters (as far as International soccer is concerned I include myself in that number). So we're proposing to build an International stadium that we haven't a snowballs chance in hell of filling. We could possibly, I grant you, fill it for the first three or four games, but once the novelty wore off we'd be back to square one, well in fact we'd be in a whole new position and one we had no idea of how to get out of. The best option for Norn Iron in my opinion is to get together with someone like Crusaders, who recently stated their intention to build a new stadium, going into partnership with a strictly laid down agreement, e.g. the club gets use of the Stadium when not required for International games and picks up a fair percentage of the running costs. We'll only need a capacity of 20,000, actually 15,000 would do, but lets have a bit of optimism for once. Norn Iron as I said, is a small country, we can ill afford to have a national stadium that lies idle for 40 weeks a year. Much better to have one that is in use almost every week, but where International games take priority and where no club can hold the governing body to ransom for £500,000 a year. Yes boys its time to 'wake up and smell the coffee', the time for dithering is over, one more good 'purge' and we can turn over a new leaf and set our 'wee' team and local football, up, for many years to come!