The First 90 Minutes.com

Tim Sansom visits Nottingham Forest’s City Ground for this week’s column, posing a question regarding the possibility of opening up this country’s stadiums.

Nottingham is a city of contrasts. For many years, I knew this East Midlands city for Brian Clough, Family Fortunes, and The Price is Right, which were filmed in the nearby Central TV studios. Like many cities in the UK, there are some beautiful areas and various suburbs that have spewed concrete over the skyline, but the city centre always seems to be bustling.

Nottingham Forest is a club of contrasts too. Within the space of thirty years, Forest have been European champions and endured a spell in the third tires of English football. Despite a whole succession of managers and various false dawns, the club has struggled to get back into the Premiership. Forest’s City Ground is at risk of becoming a monument to those days when the club won consecutive European Cups in 1979 and 1980.

The story of Nottingham Forest could easily become made into a blockbuster movie (or an ITV1 drama in these difficult economic times.) I would call it ‘The Dammed United II’, but you wonder when the good times will come back to the time because football has changed so much since the Clough reign at the City Ground.

It is not surprising that the books about Brian Clough and the great Forest players of the past are dominating the shelves of the local bookshops. Some people would say that the club has failed to move on from the Clough years, but great clubs should never allow their proud history to be forgotten. However, if you read the books of the famous players that were plying their trade during the last years of the Clough regime, you sense that the rot had begun to set in after the 1991 FA Cup Final, and spiralled out of control after Clough retired in 1993.

Students of Nottingham Forest football know that decline went from bad to worse. I have recently seen a picture of Pierre Van Hooijdonk clad in poppy red Forest training top and shorts when he began a three month strike at Forest in 1998. Some people could argue that Hooijdonk summed up much of what went wrong at Forest. Since relegation in 1999, the club has been in turmoil on and off the pitch, and it is difficult to remember that the ground was one of the host venues for Euro 96.

I was in Nottingham for a couple of days for a work-related conference, and having finished the speeches and workshops within one of the city’s high rise hotels. I wanted to take a look at the City Ground as well as the other sporting venues within the famous city. I could catch sight of the Trent End from my hotel room during the previous night although the City Ground fights with Notts County’s Meadow Lane ground for football supremacy in the Nottingham skyline. I was looking forward to the visit.

The good will fell apart when I was trying to find my way to the City Ground. I believed that the River Trent was not far away from the city centre. I may have been laden down with bags but decided to walk to the ground. It became particularly obvious that pedestrian signposts were at a minimum so I found myself walking along the spiritless London Road past a few wine bars, lined with decking with a fabulous view of a derelict canal and endless rows of warehouses. I sensed that a bit of regeneration had spluttered into life but the economic downturn had turned off the taps.

The walk seemed to take forever, but I reached Trent Bridge. The sight of the City Ground on the far side made me feel uplifted. The Trent Bridge cricket ground was nestled beside a complex traffic island, and Notts County’s Meadow Lane stadium was behind me. It was not that far from Nottingham’s Water Sport Centre too, so I felt that I was in the city’s sporting ‘zone.’

I took some pictures from the bridge via my mobile phone. I wanted a record of the visit, although some passersby seemed bemused by my presence. I was being realistic. I knew that it was unlikely that I could get inside the City Ground. It is pretty impossible for you to enter a football stadium on a non match day, unless you are on a guided tour or at a conference within the stadium. Vast sporting arenas throughout this great footballing nation remain empty for a large majority of the year. It is a weird situation for a country that is mad about their football.

There were some attempts, during the earlier part of this decade, to open up various museums and tour centres. However, in this period of economic downturn, it was always going to be the case that these initiatives would be the first to be discarded. Not all clubs, like Liverpool or Manchester United, could guarantee coach loads of overseas visitors on a wet Monday afternoon in January. A large number of grounds are now idle on a non match day apart from a bit of corporate entertaining and some tills ringing in the club shop.

At the City Ground, I was looking for the club shop and was surprised to find it shut at 2:30pm on a Saturday afternoon. I wanted a souvenir for my visit, and I would have brought a Forest mug, scarf, or shirt if I had not been confronted by bright red shutters.  A matching red gate was padlocked and I got the immediate feeling that I was not welcome. A man in a gold Mercedes was in the compound of the stadium with a number of children. I sensed that a children’s party was being prepared, but I knew that I was not invited.

I tried to look at the ‘Nottingham Forest Football Club Visitor Information Board’ to see if there was another shop within the City Ground, but I sensed that the eyes of the Mercedes man were piercing my back. He was padlocking the gates behind me, with such a verve that suggested he was secretly pleased that I could not see this ground that afternoon.

I knew that I was not wanted and made a sharp exit back to Trent Bridge. I took one last shot of the City Ground from the bridge and sensed that on this particular day, this would be as far as I could get to one of the most picturesque and historic grounds in the UK. I gave up on the tour and headed back to the station.

I still respect Nottingham Forest as well as the City Ground, and hope to visit for a game in the future. I also know that I was visiting the ground on a particular Saturday during the close season and I appreciate that finances are tight at 99% of football clubs, but I wondered whether there could be a little bit more work to make football grounds, such as the City Ground, more approachable to the casual visitor.