By Nathan Jackson
May 13 2010

Wembley Stadium is the biggest ground in the entire country, and argubaly the best in terms of quality. Although it has it's issues, you can see where the money has been spent and I am more likely to do a random visit to this ground than any other ground in the country.

Being one of the first people in the new Wembley Stadium was quite a strange sensation, especially given that I had no intention of being there. I had heard about the game but had little interest, but then someone commented that the game was only £10 to get in and I thought that given City weren't playing, it was worth the trip.

My day at Wembley started with a rather unwelcome ringing from my alarm at 5:45am, accompanied by getting into my car at 6am, then having to trudge 120something miles of motorway to New Barnet train station. Having parked there and spent about 40 minutes getting to Wembley via Kings Cross, Oxford Circus and Marylebone, I finally arrived outside Wembley Stadium, it was still only 9am.

Having spent time going to find my turnstile, I noticed a sign for "Stadium Shop" so I decided to go find it. About 20 minutes later I had walked around the whole stadium twice, unable to locate a supposedly easy-to-spot stadium shop. Having asked a steward it turned out the only shops are inside the actual ground itself, which only begged the question about why there were arrows pointing to a general stadium shop that didn't exist???

Having found absolutely nothing to do outside the ground, finally entering the turnstiles at around 10:30pm (12 midday kick off) because of a small delay where it appeared oil was leaking out of one of the escalators. After ascending several staircases, I was forced to walk near enough around half the stadium to get to my seat. Surely it would have been more appropriate to have people entering turnstiles near to where there seats actually are?

Having found the block I was supposed to go in, and I was just stunned. I had gone into this day thinking that it would be overhyped and it would turn out to be nothing more than just another bowl.....I was quite wrong. It was absolutely huge, and the pictures you can see are the view from my seat, not even at the top of the top tier. It appeared that every seat offered a great view of the stadium, and unlike the Millennium Stadium this ground actually looked pleasing to the eye.

One thing I found absolutely delightful about the new stadium was the amount of leg space and general room between seats, even the more rotund fans a few rows in front of me didn't have their rolls of flab touching each other's, that's how much space there was.

The game got underway with the stadium only about half full. A crowd of around 60,000 still looked empty in this huge arena. All the empty space made it virtually impossible to create an atmosphere, this proved disappointing given the scale of the occasion. However, I would say that on my second visit I was in amongst 22,000 Cambridge fans, and they created one hell of an atmosphere when the end was full.

Overall, I think Wembley is a fantastic stadium, but they certainly need to sort some things out, especially the fact that there's nothing to do outside the ground except walk-around, the nearest thing you could do is do your shopping at Asda. However, I will definitely want to come here again.

Wembley Stadium

Discussion started by theimps.ka (IP Logged), 13/05/2010 09:10

theimps.ka
13/05/2010 09:10

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