Heartache and pain of Rovers stadium debacle

Following news that Rovers have lost their high court row with Sainsbury’s over a new stadium, presenter of Gas-themed podcast From Bristol With Love, Dick Gerkhin, explains his version of the controversial history and why he believes the club’s directors need to be more transparent.

So now we know, finally, after seven tormented off-season weeks of waiting. Rovers won’t be building their new stadium in Frenchay, Sainsbury’s won’t be building their new supermarket in Horfield – everything stays the same.

Except that Bristol Rovers’ day in court may well have left them with crippling debts, and the threat of administration unless a new oligarch owner can be found to bankroll the club.

Perhaps a tragedy on the same level is that the team’s most promising season in a decade may have been destroyed before a ball has been kicked.

To put the decision in perspective, you need to know the recent history, both of Bristol Rovers and their time at the Memorial Stadium.

First the club. To anyone who is not a football fan of a non-Champions League club, it’s hard to describe what Bristol Rovers fans have been through the past few seasons.

To anyone who is a football fan: you can empathise……

The Return of a King. The good times are back again. A strong finish to a poor season. Promotion predicted for the next campaign. Start OK, but slowly, but surely, something’s not right. Things not working. You’re falling down the league. Too many draws. Hard to explain. Forums divided. Mini revival! Hush the doubters. Dips again. Player tiffs spill out on to social media. Manager overplays his hand. He’s lost the dressing room. Got to go. New manager doesn’t bounce. We all know now. Deep down. Relegation.

Tears. Anger. A long, miserable summer. Onwards we go again. Same new manager that didn’t bounce. Unbelieved self-belief. Straight back up! Nasty start. Bottom half after eight games. Stick with him, midstream. It starts to click. Suddenly, there’s goals. Buckets of them. Terrace heroes. Last gasp victories. The fates are with us. We win all the big games. The terrace awakes from its long slumber. Atmosphere. Unity. The poor start forgotten as a nine-point gap chased down. Top of the League! Second in the League. Only one goes up automatic.. Playoffs. Confident but you never know. Win away leg. Win home leg. Wembley. We freeze. Should be over by 20 minutes. We recover. Equalise. Terrible game. Extra time. We all know now. Penalties. We win. Promotion.

A familiar rollercoaster of emotions to any Football League side. But throughout these downs and ups, another saga has been playing out, with a longer history.

In 1986 Bristol Rovers move from their temporary home in Bath to the Memorial Stadium, on the corner of Gloucester and Muller roads. We move there as guests of Bristol Rugby Club, but when dark financial clouds break over them we buy the ground (for a pound) and the guests become the hosts.

For the first time in 25 years, since the loss of myth-laden Eastville (where Tesco and Ikea are now), we own our own home. Like new homeowners do, we set about planning a few home Improvements. We ask the council for permission to turn the pitch around, turn the terraces into seats and increase the capacity. We get all the plans in place just in time for Lehman Brothers to collapse and send the global economy into a flatspin. The major renovations never take place.

At around the same time, Nick Higgs sells his stake in Cowlin Construction and brings his bulging pockets to Bristol Rovers to become the new chairman of the club. Higgs is what modern culture calls a ‘marmite’ type of person. Some fans appreciate the money he has put in (and the sum he’s lost) to suppport the club, and his transformation of the club from the Dunford family’s plaything to a corporate entity in line with the model of a modern football club.

Others point to the streaks of blood on the boardroom floor, relics of a succession of Higgs’ opponents who have suddenly “left by mutual consent”, sometimes seemingly without even knowing they had. Despite the addition of supporters’ reps to the board, there remains a culture of politburo-style secrecy – the monthly chairman’s reports are less smoke and mirrors, more Berlin Wall between fans and the truth of what’s going on.

Finally, the league position of Higgs’ model corporate club has been in terminal decline under his stewardship (although, his supporters would argue, he has given managers big budgets and the majority of coaching appointments have had the majority of fans’ approval at the time they were made).

Back to the saga. As the 2008 Memorial Stadium development drive falters, Team Higgs sets about finding alternative solutions. By 2011, a plan has been hatched: the Memorial Stadium will be sold to Sainsbury’s and Bristol Rovers will move to a new 21,700 stadium next to the UWE in Filton.

The catch is that both the new ground and the supermarket require planning permission. The new stadium is going to be built in the middle of nowhere, Hewlett Packard have a moan to keep their Saturday shift workers happy, but all flows relatively smoothly and permission is granted to build at the new site.

As you would expect, the tight-packed residential area around Filton Avenue is much less easy to flow around and smooth over. Local voices of opposition are soon boosted by factions with their own agendas. The Green Party oppose another supermarket that will kill off the vibrancy of the Best Independent Street in the UK (i.e. the nearby Tescos and the existing Sainsbury’s down the hill). The anti-pollution lobby cry foul about the amount of extra traffic onto already congested routes. Rugby fans (still smarting from their turn from hosts to guests in their memorial home) pour their disgust onto social media at the loss of an important heritage site, that they had let crumble for decades.

These malcontents join forces to create TRASHorfield, a company incorporated with only one aim – to destroy the plans that Team Higgs has crafted. The council planning committee becomes the battleground for a long war of attrition, involving claims and counter-claims, evidence and dossiers, facts and assertions.

Eventually, in the summer of 2013, the decision is made – defeat for TRASHorfield, planning permission for Sainsbury’s approved. But, is it victory for Sainsbury’s? From the turn of the century they have been troubled by the new high street German discount grocers and by 2013 are starting to lose market share. At some point over that year and the next, they begin to develop a new corporate strategy. The back pages of the broadsheets report Sainsbury’s’ attempts to calm their shareholders; sales in their large superstores are falling, sales in smaller convenience stores are holding up. No more big stores, they promise. But, of course, they are already contractually committed to Rovers, naturally. The contract is “watertight”, Higgs assures us in his chairman’s report.

Meanwhile the planning process rumbles on. A judicial review of the decision by Eric Pickles is another agonising wait for fans, but again the decision is in their favour. Finally, step forward Jamie Carstairs, “Shield of the Fallen” to claim that the ‘Memorial’ the stadium’s name refers to is not the inscripted gates as previously assumed (and already under protection from Sainsbury’s development) – in fact the whole ground is a memorial, and so must be kept as is ad infinitum.

For many gasheads, including me, this is the final indignity. What right has this “academic” to drape himself in the shroud of thousands of working class dead, or their grieving families, and then claim they speak through him? I can guarantee if we are ever foolish enough to be led by donkeys into another Great War, it will be the rank-and-file Bristol Rovers supporters who will pay the price, as did their ancestors who died, and their ancestors who survived to honour them with the Memorial.

Mr Carstairs’ opinion is no more valid than any gashead on the terraces, who have kept the memorial honoured in the way those dead heroes would really appreciate – by celebrating life and having a disco! The Memorial to the Fallen is in our hearts, and in our desire for it to never happen again, not in some decaying concrete step.

TRASHorfield (although very annoying and utterly devastating to our plans) were a valid part of the planning process and we should have expected residents to fight any change to their own situation. Carstairs is nothing more than an opportunist, and I’m disgusted by him.

Through all this metaphorical wind and rain, Sainsbury’s grip on the shared brolly starts to loosen. A seemingly minor amendment to morning delivery times becomes a sticking point. Rumours abound that the watertight contract has been breached. Sainsbury’s are pulling out. Nonsense, declares Team Higgs. It’s written in stone. Watertight. The chairman reports to quell dissent. Nothing to worry about. Sainsburys are committed to the deal. Malicious rumours on the forums. Questionable motives. Axes to grind. Sainsbury’s do not want to pull out. Even if they do, they can’t. Watertight. We all know now. It’s going to court.

The saga has not yet run its course – there are still appeals to higher courts to be heard – but now is as good a time as ever to take stock, and ask some difficult questions of Team Higgs.

What was the motivation for moving to a new stadium rather than developing the existing site? We were looking to build a 21,700 seater stadium for an average fan base of 7-12,000. The current Memorial ground holds ten thousand, investment (funded by loans secured on the stadium) could have increased that by 50 per cent – surely enough for League Two and League One attendances.

We were ending 100 years of being embedded in working class communities – Easton and Fishponds, then Kingswood (via nearby Twerton), and then Southmead and Lockleaze – to take up residence in a business park next to a university with not even an off-license, let alone a pub, for miles around.

We were moving from a unique, proud (although sometimes bigoted & bloody) terrace culture identity, to an off-the-shelf, all-seater stadium kit that we would struggle to third-fill on a Tuesday night.

What made this worthwhile to the fans? The decision was framed as one between progress or decay.  Swansea City or Lincoln City. And always in the background, like a dull ache, the success of The Other City, Bristol City, the pressure of “Mind the Gap” (two divisions for more than a decade now). This was an opportunity we could not afford to pass up.

Maybe more interesting, and more controversial, was what made Team Higgs continue on with a plan that got more and more bogged down in difficulties, costing more and more money in delayed commissions and then legal costs. At the 2015 AGM the club admitted that it had taken out a £2 million high-interest loan to cover the court costs, rather than look to directors to loan the necessary funds.

The club took a gamble on winning the case, and lost. They would say the risk was worth taking, but was the chance of a new stadium really worth putting the future of the club in jeopardy for? Leaving aside the financial wrecking ball that posible court costs imply, the 12 point deduction, if it happens, will ruin the most promising season that Rovers fans have been able to look forward to for nearly a decade. Not since the “Lennie & Trolls” promotion from League Two in 2007 have Gasheads looked forward to a new season with such hope. A strong team, a good manager, the momentum of a thrilling promotion back into the football league, and – after a decade of divisions – the packed-again terraces united in their support. Now it could all have been lost.

For me, a telling “minor detail” oozed through the wall of secrecy at an early stage of the planning. We would not own the new stadium, or even part own it. We would lease it for 99 years from UWE. So the £30 million gained from the property sale of the Memorial Stadium would go to ….. what? All on new bricks and new mortar – UWE says that Rovers would be investing “approximately £30 million” in the complex that contains the stadium? Or some on repayment of directors loans (plus interest?) Consultation fees? Activation of clauses, settlement of claims, reimbursement of past losses?As always, the fans will very likely be the last to know. Until transparency improves, the feeling will remain (however misguided) that the UWE stadium may have always been more about the interests of Team Higgs than Bristol Rovers.