Actors and acrobats at the home of English football

If you want to know why the pitch at Wembley is a "national disgrace", you only have to look at what happened on Saturday, said Malcolm Folley in The Mail on Sunday. First, the FA had allowed Saracens and Harlequins to play a rugby match at the home of the England football team. Then, prior to kick-off, cast members from the hit West End show War Horse "parked their bus in a corner of the stadium and delivered a cameo performance". Next, the band Right Said Fred took to the pitch and encouraged the crowd to join them in a singalong of their signature tune, I'm Too Sexy. The show continued after that: a man
on a high wire walked across rhe width of the stadium while gymnasts performed somersaults on trampolines 150ft below. Eventually, the match took place, but not before further damage had been done to Wembley's already abysmal playing surface.
Just to remind you, said Policy, this new Wembley cost £757m to build and opened - over-budget and a year late - in 2007. Since then, the pitch has been re-laid 10 times, at a cost of more than £lm. And it is still an appalling surface. "I wouldn't run horses on that," said Harry Redknapp after Tottenham's FA Cup semi-final defeat to Portsmouth. Sir Alex Ferguson has also criticised the pitch, blaming Wembley for the hamstring


injury sustained by Michael Owen during rhe Carting Cup final. Just months after the stadium opened, Croatia's manager, Slaven Bilic, was lamenting conditions. "The pitch is no good," he said. "The top looks soft but underneath it is hard. So it is very slippery, it is like ice." Yet nothing has been done.
As usual, the problem is money, said Jim Holden in The Sunday Express. "The business plan required to pay off the debts accrued in the construction of the stadium means that Wembley has to stage many other events, like music concerts, that


require rhe pitch to be taken up and then replaced afterwards." Most top stadiums have long-term surfaces with grass reinforced by artificial fibres. Wembley could easily have gone down that route "if it didn't need to prostitute its basic function as a football stadium". And England's problems don't end there, said Owen Slot in The Times. With just seven weeks to go until the team move into their South African base for the World Cup finals, the HQ - in Bafokeng Sports Campus in Phokeng, near Rustenburg - is still "a building site". The medical centre, a "thermal rehab room", the media centre and the gym are all incomplete. To add insult to injury, work on Germany's base finished more than three years ago.