The "Council" blame the recession but there has not been a 40 year recession, and that's the time they have been screwing with Odsal Stadium. I bet that the total "consultancy fees" paid over that period would be nearly enough to have constructed a new Wembley on site, instead there are several very wealthy consultants laughing hysterically all the way to the bank, at Council taxpayers' expense, while as ever - and entirely predictably - absolutely no progress is made.
This will have come as a huge blow and a shock to Hood, who as recently as the Past Players dinner was expressing certainty that the scheme was imminently going ahead. If so, then maybe he feels the same "kick in the stomach" as I did some decades ago when I had my first experience of the Odsal Letdown. But such is the incompetence of this Council, and such is their abysmal track record on developing Odsal, that sadly most people's reaction is "WTF did you really expect?"
As has been said, having piloted the decline of Bradford with the first "Wembley of the North" grandiose pipedreams decades ago, the Council have been good at only one thing, and that is knocking down, or letting fall down, increasing chunks of the city. Unsurprisingly, with so much experience, they have now perfected this, such that they have even contrived to have half the city centre converted into a bomb site which we are now told is almost certain to remain so for at least another 4 years. Itself a wild guess with no substance to back up even that prediction. So a full decade without a Centre, then?
From the Bulls' point of view, I don't know what we can now do to survive. As Adey has pointed out, we are stuck at Odsal and it is outside our powers to just leave. Maybe the worst case scenario of letting the club go bust is the actual only practical way out of that one, but without a ground, we can't even apply for the next SL licence so Bulls Holdings (2010) Ltd playing out of VP seems to be the only alternative to oblivion.
Fsck you, Bradford Council.
