mudshark
Chris Armstrong
Re: Northumberland Development Project - Archway On Fire
I suspect you may be right on both those last counts, and I sincerely hope you are bang on the money with the second, because I do think it would turn into a compromise, both in engineering terms and in terms of our identity, because it would inevitably feel like a ground-share. On the broader issue, though, I just don't think there can be anything more than a novelty value in it, ultimately, and it feels like the worst kind of short-termism. Football is the world's favourite game, which the Americans have only come around to taking a proper interest in recently because enough US-born players have spent enough time in foreign leagues now to give their national side credibility on the world stage. They're only interested in sports they can dominate, and now they think they can win the World Cup, so there's all the tra-la-la. American football, on the other hand, is more or less a cultural irrelevance outside the parochial borders of the US. I don't believe there'll ever be enough serious interest in it in Europe for it to gain a permanent foothold, and if a London franchise does happen, it will only be a historical footnote in my view, regarded ultimately as a failed experiment, albeit one that made a few people more money for a while. I'm just dead against that failure being enshrined in our legacy.
I suspect you may be right on both those last counts, and I sincerely hope you are bang on the money with the second, because I do think it would turn into a compromise, both in engineering terms and in terms of our identity, because it would inevitably feel like a ground-share. On the broader issue, though, I just don't think there can be anything more than a novelty value in it, ultimately, and it feels like the worst kind of short-termism. Football is the world's favourite game, which the Americans have only come around to taking a proper interest in recently because enough US-born players have spent enough time in foreign leagues now to give their national side credibility on the world stage. They're only interested in sports they can dominate, and now they think they can win the World Cup, so there's all the tra-la-la. American football, on the other hand, is more or less a cultural irrelevance outside the parochial borders of the US. I don't believe there'll ever be enough serious interest in it in Europe for it to gain a permanent foothold, and if a London franchise does happen, it will only be a historical footnote in my view, regarded ultimately as a failed experiment, albeit one that made a few people more money for a while. I'm just dead against that failure being enshrined in our legacy.