Bath Chronicle – 29 July2005
Rec stands come under pressure
by Mike Tremlett
Premier Rugby confirmed this week that it is set to adopt a policy aimed at pushing Guinness Premiership clubs’ stadium capacities towards the 12,500 mark over the next two years.
Down at the Rec, where 10,500 long suffering supporters are shoe-horned into a makeshift stadium long overdue for development, the news will hardly have been unexpected.
Let’s face it, the Rec may be the most evocative of all English club grounds, nestling as it does in the heart of one of the country’s most beautiful cities, but it’s hardly state of the art.
Realistically, as a stadium, the Rec is a shambles cobbled together around the Hamptons Stand, the old west stand, which has been falling down for more years than anybody cares to remember, and uncovered and uncomfortable temporary seating.
Yet, over the next nine months close to 250,000 dedicated supporters, home-based and visitors, will brave the worst of the elements, queue to use temporary toilet blocks and socialise in makeshift bars to see their team play.
There is something perverse, ergo, in the surefire certainty that Premier Rugby’s impending edict will pose Bath Rugby, a club based in the country’s most rugby-oriented city, more problems than any other members of England’s domestic elite.
But Premier Rugby won’t be causing the problem. The pressure groups intent on resisting any and all development of the Rec’s facilities and, if possible, banishing the club from the Rec completely will.
Bath Rugby openly favour a sympathetic development of the Rec’s facilities – with a three-sided all-seater affair incorporating clubhouse, dressing-room and corporate hospitality facilities backing on to a rejuvenated riverside with the temporary east stand completing the rugby arena.
Capable of doubling-up as a wonderful outdoor multi-cultural venue through the summer with the temporary stand removed, it would give Bath the facilities to stage events on a par with the likes of, say, Glyndebourne or the Milton Keynes Bowl.
As things stand, that won’t happen inside two years, if at all, if the pressure groups – the most vociferous of them undemocratically formed and almost impossible to join,, with no easily accessible constitution, elected office-bearers or published statement of its aims, get their way.
Premier Rugby, rightly, is keen to encourage clubs to make the most of unprecedented public interest in rugby union which is filling more Premiership grounds around the country than ever before.
If, as they plan to, Premier Rugby pushes stadium capacities upward generating more revenue for the clubs, it’s a safe bet that will trigger relaxation in the salary cap, allowing them to spend more on their squads.
The clear danger to a club such as Bath, unless things change on the Rec front, is that accommodating bigger crowds is pipe-dream territory.
And that condemns Bath Rugby and their supporters to the prospect of a slow, but inevitable, downward spiral away from the top end of the professional game.
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