Post by QPR Report on Nov 7, 2009 7:53:16 GMT
David Lacey/ The Guardian
Name and shame: Mike Ashley's latest folly is vulgarChanging the name of St James' Park shows how little the Newcastle owner understands about football
So what's in a name ? Quite a lot when it comes to football grounds. For a supporter the name of a stadium or its location, which sometimes serves as a name, is etched as deep on the soul as the team that plays there. Memories of the Kop, the North Bank, the Shed, the Chicken Run or whatever are precious even though many of these gathering places have long since been bulldozed to oblivion.
If Mike Ashley, the power at Newcastle United, was not previously aware of this, the gap in his education has quickly been filled. Ashley and his associates have decreed that for the next six months Newcastle will no longer be playing at St James' Park but at something called sportsdirect.com@StJames'ParkStadium. Sports Direct is Ashley's company and it is hoped that this will attract new sponsors, possibly from the far east, in which case the ground could become the Sony Bravia Arena or some such.
Needless to say Tyneside fans are further up in arms about the running of the club since Ashley took control two years ago, accusing him of caring nothing about Newcastle's history. According to Steve Wraith, the editor of Players Inc fanzine: "It's not something you can come in and tweak." None of which is likely to make much of an impression on the man in charge. Ashley will tweak on regardless.
The successful modern businessman needs a thick skin and in Newcastle's case should be up there with a T rex. It is hard to think of a title more likely to offend supporters unless it had been decided to rechristen the ground the Dennis Wise Memorial Coliseum. Then again it is primarily a commercial move. The media are unlikely to swallow the new mouthful in reporting Newcastle's matches; St James' Park will still be St James' Park unless someone forgets and calls it St James's Park. And fans rarely mention the title of a stadium in conversation anyway. They just talk about going to a game (unless, of course, Newcastle are visiting Sunderland in which case their followers tell people they are going to the Stadium of Shite).
Nevertheless, the idea of tinkering with a football name which has been around a long time will usually rankle, as Chelsea may discover if they do decide that in future they will be playing at Samsung Stamford Bridge. On the other hand giving a sponsor's moniker to a newly built ground is different and for football followers such names have become more readily associated with the teams than the product. Think of the Emirates and you think of Arsenal rather than a Middle East airline. The Reebok is about Bolton Wanderers rather than tracksuits. For reporters, Hull City play at the KC Stadium rather than the Kingston Communications Stadium.
Originally the names of football grounds did not exercise the minds of clubs and supporters to the extent that they do now that the matter has become commercially significant. When Newcastle West End and Newcastle East End joined forces to become Newcastle United they agreed to play at the former's Town Moor ground, which from then on was known as St James' Park. When West Ham moved to their present venue early in the last century they decided to call it the Boleyn Ground because there was a property known as Boleyn Castle next door. But for the football world in general West Ham play at Upton Park. Tottenham play at White Hart Lane and in the minds of many will continue to do so even when the new stadium, which may well carry a sponsor's logo, is built nearby. Yet in its early days Spurs' home was known as the High Road Ground, which would be particularly apt now given the regularity with which the High Road traffic grinds to a halt on match days.
Derby County used to play at the Baseball Ground because that was the sport played there originally. The name of its successor, Pride Park, is relevant only as a reminder of what goeth before a fall. Even so this Park is more comfortable than the parks of Burnden, Roker, Ayresome and others used to be. Standing on a rain-soaked terrace in January being pushed and pummelled by a howling mob was about the least park-like experience that anyone could imagine. Yet none of these places suffered the indignity of being relabelled as an email address. Vulgarising St James' Park, even for six months, is a bit like insisting that Buckingham Palace should henceforth be known as liztwo@buckhouse.com
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/nov/07/st-james-park-sportdirectcom
Dara O Briain/The Guardian
Jockstrap Park needs a proper name, not an email addressA child excreting Scrabble tiles could not have come up with a worse name for Newcastle United's historic stadium
Of all the legendary stadiums I've wanted to visit all my life – San Siro, the Maracanã, Fenway Park – the one that always stirred the imagination most was sportsdirect.com@St James' Park Stadium. Why do I love it so? Maybe it's the history. Maybe it's the famous passion of the local support. Or maybe it's because when I type it, it automatically gets underlined and highlighted by the word processor.
Even my laptop recognises that this is no mundane stadium. This is no ordinary place. No, this is an email address. One could debate for minutes the philosophical ramifications of having your home ground floating, untethered, somewhere in cyberspace. At the very least it'll change forever one of the hoariest cliches in sports punditry. Pundit one: "I see Newcastle are playing Barcelona in the next round." Pundit two: "Well, on paper, you'd have to favour Barcelona." Pundit one: "But Newcastle don't play on paper, do they? They play somewhere on the internet. Just left of Twitter, in fact, just before you get to Facebook."
It is a terrible, terrible name. It's difficult to think of how it could have been worse, short of getting a passing toddler to crawl across the keyboard towards a rusk; unless you filled the rusk with Scrabble tiles and then nervously waited for the child to excrete them out in some sort of order. No amount of monkeys with typewriters, working for any amount of time, could come up with something clumsier.
Maybe it's all the internal punctuation. I'm trying to think of any other place name that manages to ram in a full-stop and apostrophe and that @ thing into such a small space, but the only ones that come to mind are the offices of multimedia design companies called things like bRAIN-sPL@!, as in "bRAIN-sPL@! will make your vision of a connected e-retail future work for you!" Nobody should have to play football in a punctuation nightmare like that. Apart from MK Dons, who play at stadium:MK, but then they'll do a bit of website design for you on the side. And yes, I know Arsenal play at the Emirates, and that's not a proper stadium name either, but for some reason that's never really bothered me. Mainly because it's never been called anything else; and while Highbury might now be a block of flats, it's still called Highbury Square and looks as brilliantly unchanged as it possibly could.
Mainly, though, "Emirates" isn't a word I use very often and rarely think about the meaning of. I'm sure there must be an actual Emir somewhere, now that you mention it, but he rarely turns up, trying to get his ceremonial sword past security. There are many supporters who insist on calling the ground "Ashburton Grove" and, while I admire their integrity, I've lived on the Holloway Road and, frankly, can think of few places that less fit my image of a grove. A great place to pick up some fried chicken, though. I'd be less ambivalent if I was trudging over to the Singapore Airlines Stadium every couple of weeks, or God fear, the Ryanair SportsDome. You can insert your own Ryanair joke there, about paying extra for access to scoreboards, or the toilets, or to see both teams.
This is the rule then. The more commercial the branding, the more crass and unpleasant it sounds. Coventry can get away with the Ricoh Arena because few of us are in the market for a photocopier. Conversely, it doesn't matter if Rowntree-Mackintosh were a great local company, York City shouldn't be playing at KitKat Crescent. And Newcastle play at one the great stadiums. The third-biggest league ground in the country, the largest cantilevered roof in Europe and, in the farthest corner of the Jackie Milburn Stand, the highest point above the pitch of any stadium in England. This is what a stadium should inspire. Vertigo.
It should strike fear into the hearts of opposing supporters. They should be going: "I don't care if Ant and Dec are over there, this place scares the bejaysus out of me. We'll be lucky to get out of here alive." You shouldn't approach a stadium saying to yourself: "Ah, sportsdirect.com! That reminds me. I must go online and buy a jockstrap."
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/nov/07/dara-o-briain-sportsdirectcom-newcastle
Name and shame: Mike Ashley's latest folly is vulgarChanging the name of St James' Park shows how little the Newcastle owner understands about football
So what's in a name ? Quite a lot when it comes to football grounds. For a supporter the name of a stadium or its location, which sometimes serves as a name, is etched as deep on the soul as the team that plays there. Memories of the Kop, the North Bank, the Shed, the Chicken Run or whatever are precious even though many of these gathering places have long since been bulldozed to oblivion.
If Mike Ashley, the power at Newcastle United, was not previously aware of this, the gap in his education has quickly been filled. Ashley and his associates have decreed that for the next six months Newcastle will no longer be playing at St James' Park but at something called sportsdirect.com@StJames'ParkStadium. Sports Direct is Ashley's company and it is hoped that this will attract new sponsors, possibly from the far east, in which case the ground could become the Sony Bravia Arena or some such.
Needless to say Tyneside fans are further up in arms about the running of the club since Ashley took control two years ago, accusing him of caring nothing about Newcastle's history. According to Steve Wraith, the editor of Players Inc fanzine: "It's not something you can come in and tweak." None of which is likely to make much of an impression on the man in charge. Ashley will tweak on regardless.
The successful modern businessman needs a thick skin and in Newcastle's case should be up there with a T rex. It is hard to think of a title more likely to offend supporters unless it had been decided to rechristen the ground the Dennis Wise Memorial Coliseum. Then again it is primarily a commercial move. The media are unlikely to swallow the new mouthful in reporting Newcastle's matches; St James' Park will still be St James' Park unless someone forgets and calls it St James's Park. And fans rarely mention the title of a stadium in conversation anyway. They just talk about going to a game (unless, of course, Newcastle are visiting Sunderland in which case their followers tell people they are going to the Stadium of Shite).
Nevertheless, the idea of tinkering with a football name which has been around a long time will usually rankle, as Chelsea may discover if they do decide that in future they will be playing at Samsung Stamford Bridge. On the other hand giving a sponsor's moniker to a newly built ground is different and for football followers such names have become more readily associated with the teams than the product. Think of the Emirates and you think of Arsenal rather than a Middle East airline. The Reebok is about Bolton Wanderers rather than tracksuits. For reporters, Hull City play at the KC Stadium rather than the Kingston Communications Stadium.
Originally the names of football grounds did not exercise the minds of clubs and supporters to the extent that they do now that the matter has become commercially significant. When Newcastle West End and Newcastle East End joined forces to become Newcastle United they agreed to play at the former's Town Moor ground, which from then on was known as St James' Park. When West Ham moved to their present venue early in the last century they decided to call it the Boleyn Ground because there was a property known as Boleyn Castle next door. But for the football world in general West Ham play at Upton Park. Tottenham play at White Hart Lane and in the minds of many will continue to do so even when the new stadium, which may well carry a sponsor's logo, is built nearby. Yet in its early days Spurs' home was known as the High Road Ground, which would be particularly apt now given the regularity with which the High Road traffic grinds to a halt on match days.
Derby County used to play at the Baseball Ground because that was the sport played there originally. The name of its successor, Pride Park, is relevant only as a reminder of what goeth before a fall. Even so this Park is more comfortable than the parks of Burnden, Roker, Ayresome and others used to be. Standing on a rain-soaked terrace in January being pushed and pummelled by a howling mob was about the least park-like experience that anyone could imagine. Yet none of these places suffered the indignity of being relabelled as an email address. Vulgarising St James' Park, even for six months, is a bit like insisting that Buckingham Palace should henceforth be known as liztwo@buckhouse.com
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/nov/07/st-james-park-sportdirectcom
Dara O Briain/The Guardian
Jockstrap Park needs a proper name, not an email addressA child excreting Scrabble tiles could not have come up with a worse name for Newcastle United's historic stadium
Of all the legendary stadiums I've wanted to visit all my life – San Siro, the Maracanã, Fenway Park – the one that always stirred the imagination most was sportsdirect.com@St James' Park Stadium. Why do I love it so? Maybe it's the history. Maybe it's the famous passion of the local support. Or maybe it's because when I type it, it automatically gets underlined and highlighted by the word processor.
Even my laptop recognises that this is no mundane stadium. This is no ordinary place. No, this is an email address. One could debate for minutes the philosophical ramifications of having your home ground floating, untethered, somewhere in cyberspace. At the very least it'll change forever one of the hoariest cliches in sports punditry. Pundit one: "I see Newcastle are playing Barcelona in the next round." Pundit two: "Well, on paper, you'd have to favour Barcelona." Pundit one: "But Newcastle don't play on paper, do they? They play somewhere on the internet. Just left of Twitter, in fact, just before you get to Facebook."
It is a terrible, terrible name. It's difficult to think of how it could have been worse, short of getting a passing toddler to crawl across the keyboard towards a rusk; unless you filled the rusk with Scrabble tiles and then nervously waited for the child to excrete them out in some sort of order. No amount of monkeys with typewriters, working for any amount of time, could come up with something clumsier.
Maybe it's all the internal punctuation. I'm trying to think of any other place name that manages to ram in a full-stop and apostrophe and that @ thing into such a small space, but the only ones that come to mind are the offices of multimedia design companies called things like bRAIN-sPL@!, as in "bRAIN-sPL@! will make your vision of a connected e-retail future work for you!" Nobody should have to play football in a punctuation nightmare like that. Apart from MK Dons, who play at stadium:MK, but then they'll do a bit of website design for you on the side. And yes, I know Arsenal play at the Emirates, and that's not a proper stadium name either, but for some reason that's never really bothered me. Mainly because it's never been called anything else; and while Highbury might now be a block of flats, it's still called Highbury Square and looks as brilliantly unchanged as it possibly could.
Mainly, though, "Emirates" isn't a word I use very often and rarely think about the meaning of. I'm sure there must be an actual Emir somewhere, now that you mention it, but he rarely turns up, trying to get his ceremonial sword past security. There are many supporters who insist on calling the ground "Ashburton Grove" and, while I admire their integrity, I've lived on the Holloway Road and, frankly, can think of few places that less fit my image of a grove. A great place to pick up some fried chicken, though. I'd be less ambivalent if I was trudging over to the Singapore Airlines Stadium every couple of weeks, or God fear, the Ryanair SportsDome. You can insert your own Ryanair joke there, about paying extra for access to scoreboards, or the toilets, or to see both teams.
This is the rule then. The more commercial the branding, the more crass and unpleasant it sounds. Coventry can get away with the Ricoh Arena because few of us are in the market for a photocopier. Conversely, it doesn't matter if Rowntree-Mackintosh were a great local company, York City shouldn't be playing at KitKat Crescent. And Newcastle play at one the great stadiums. The third-biggest league ground in the country, the largest cantilevered roof in Europe and, in the farthest corner of the Jackie Milburn Stand, the highest point above the pitch of any stadium in England. This is what a stadium should inspire. Vertigo.
It should strike fear into the hearts of opposing supporters. They should be going: "I don't care if Ant and Dec are over there, this place scares the bejaysus out of me. We'll be lucky to get out of here alive." You shouldn't approach a stadium saying to yourself: "Ah, sportsdirect.com! That reminds me. I must go online and buy a jockstrap."
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/nov/07/dara-o-briain-sportsdirectcom-newcastle