Odsal move looks on as finances pressure City into abandoning home

WHEN starting out as a cub reporter in Bradford many, many moons ago, a wide-eyed Sutcliffe was offered a couple of pertinent pieces of advice by the news editor.

Namely, always get your expenses in on time and never, ever take at face value the latest grandiose scheme to redevelop Odsal and bring together Bradford Northern (as they were, back then) and City under the same roof.

I am minded of the first point towards the end of every month and can proudly say a deadline has never passed without the requisite bundle of receipts sitting in the editor’s office.

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Likewise, my old news editor’s warning to be wary with regards all things Odsal has proved equally invaluable in ensuring I am yet to fall for the various ambitious redevelopment plans that have rolled off the planners’ drawing boards in the intervening years.

Whether it be the £200m Superdome farrago of the early Nineties or the more recent Sporting Village scheme that bit the dust last year, I, in common with most Bradfordians who don’t spend a substantial amount of their time occupying the corridors of power inside City Hall, have always met the unveiling of the latest multi-million pound scheme with nothing more than a resigned shrug and the thought: ‘We’ll see’.

Thanks to the global downturn that has put a squeeze on private as well as public finances, the chances are we will have to wait quite some time for the next ‘Wembley of the North’ scheme to be unveiled. That, my old news editor would no doubt have told me, is not necessarily a bad thing.

What has become apparent to even this Bradford Council tax payer, however, is that the much-touted day when the city’s senior football and rugby league clubs share a home ground appears to be edging closer.

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A year ago in the wake of the Sporting Village project collapsing, Valley Parade looked the most likely site for a joining together. In this very newspaper, Bantams joint-chairman Julian Rhodes outlined a blueprint for the future whereby Bradford’s two senior sports clubs would merge and the proceeds from selling Odsal used to buy back City’s home of more than a century from the family pension fund of former chairman Gordon Gibb.

Predictably, the plan never got off the ground despite an initially encouraging series of meetings.

Twelve months on, however, and the picture has changed with the possibility of City moving up to Odsal now on the agenda. And, from what my sources in Bradford are telling me, for the first time since the immediate aftermath of the 1985 fire disaster, the plan is very much a goer – subject to the football club being able to both legally free themselves from a lease that still has 17 years to run and satisfy certain Football League criteria.

One such condition, as Rotherham United found out when ditching Millmoor for the Don Valley in 2008 after a falling-out with their landlord, is remaining in the conurbation – something that will not be a problem at Odsal.

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Another is that Bradford, due to having spent three years in the second tier since the adoption of the Taylor Report in the Nineties, are one of a host of clubs who must play in an all-seater stadia.

With half of Odsal containing open terraces, this could clearly represent a problem – though, as I found out yesterday when doing a bit of digging, the existing regulations are somewhat vague so finding a solution may not be too hard.

League chiefs would also surely do all they could to accommodate a move if, as joint chairman Mark Lawn made clear in yesterday’s Yorkshire Post when revealing the draining effect annual overheads of £1.25m are having on already battered finances, the alternative was Bradford losing its second senior football club in 40 years.

City are, of course, still hoping to agree a reduction in the near £780,000 rent paid annually to the family pension fund of former chairman Gibb and Prupim, who own the office block that sits adjacent to Valley Parade.

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Judging by the e-mails that landed in the YP in-box yesterday, a sizeable number of Bradfordians are desperate a compromise can be found – not least because, as the residents of Hull and Scarborough quickly found, a vacated sports ground can very quickly become a magnet for decay and vandalism.

However, if a deal can not be struck, the game of musical sporting chairs that has dominated sporting debate in Bradford for decades seems like finally being brought to an end with Odsal, albeit without the much-touted redevelopment, emerging as the winner. Just don’t tell my old news editor.