You fail to understand the difficulty in raising money for the stadium and the maximum possible money has been gleaned from maximum resources.

The council are a go ahead council, and they have invested what they possibly can into the project as far as I know.

Sadfish, please give me some credit, I fully understand the problems with raising funding currently for development, but I again say did not the number one RL club not deserve The Best!

When I look at the state of the town centre and the selection of stores, I don't see it as a go ahead council, look at towns much smaller than St Helens, we are more Bar City! LOL

Pointing out someone is talking out of their backside is [inot[/i a personal attack, no matter how badly you want it to be.

You can only relate this council with previous councils, of which there has been different levels of involvement with the club and spending available on the town.

The councils role is for the administration and betterment of the town itself, a private rugby league club, no matter how successful is always going to up against it when it comes to hand outs against social matters.

And then there is the issue that even Wigan can't average 18K per season, which is a town that has been far more prosperous over the years, and has often had better gates than Saints.

Unless you where looking at more than 25K then the DW Stadium and the Reebok would always be ahead in the running for "other" events in the area.

That makes them so totally different from previous councils. Their attitude towards this attempt to get a stadium built have been vastly different from previous attitudes. I think this is in part because lately there has been a hung council so there is possibly less of an emphasis upon party dogma. I think also that with Pilks finally being sold off, the council has realised that if Saints don't succeed, St Helens will have pretty much nothing left of its heritage or identity. Not to mention regeneration opportunity.

I personally think it's just the right size; Wigan and Hull FC draw good crowds, but the atmosphere often suffers due to the number of empty seats and the size of the ground.

18k is good! I can see us with an average of about 14k, so the ground will always be reasonably full. If it leads to people getting into the habit of buying tickets in advance, because some people get locked out from time to time, that's great.

I agree.

The rest of what you said is all fair enough.
But c'mon, you know and I know that these two people have stated overly ambitious timelines for the progress of this in the past. Timelines that at the time they made the statements anybody who knows anything about this sort of thing knew straight away were totally unrealistic.

Let's just hope that this time they are right.

However, I'd suggest the timeframe they posit is achievable only if the builders don't find toxic waste or unchartered mining. Both scenarioes are a distinct possibility, and has happened with most other building in this area.

Let's hope luck is with us and our leader's time estimates are correct. But I'd much rather they were fully open and told the full story and not just anounce a best case scenario.

For our needs, a stadium that holds 18,000 is bang on, apart from the World Club Challenge match and Australia v England games, the new stadium will be fit for purpose for any other game played during a normal season.
St Helens will no doubt in the future hold many neutral venued games plus internationals other than Australia, I only hope the town centre can rise to the occasion when this does happen, and give these fans a good day out.

I think our Chief Exec was the first to contact the RFL about holding games for the World Cup. It would be a great venue for internationals I think.

i'm sure they are aware of all those things, their quote is purely based on what the builders tell them I would assume.

The Saints marketing team will have a big selling job to do with season tickets.

Will supporters buy season tickets not knowing how many games are going to be played at the new stadium?

I suppose by October next year Saints will have a better idea of what the situation is with regard to the ground, but I can't see supporters being happy if they are charged full price for a 13 home game ticket and then some of the games are on the road.

For example if Saints have 7,000 season ticket holders, do you think all of them will travel to Widnes / Leigh / Warrington etc.
Somehow I don't.
I'm guessing more people would buy a "half season" ticket when they know the ground situation in full.

I would have thought some sort of survey had been done by Langtree as to what lies under the stadium site, people might also remember the link road being delayed by over a year when a very old pit face was found when cutting the link road out at the back of what now is Currys, Liverpool University where called in who stopped the job for months, then all the coal had to be removed.

its not as hard as selling wigan's season tickets, at least at saints you'll win most of the games. whereever they are played

Unless that council happens to be Warrington who saved the club from adminstration by buying Wilderspool for £1.5M and leasing it back for a peppercorn rental and then letting them out of the lease without any penalties and is now stuck with a decrepit ground on their hands having written off the £1.5M.

In addition they then threw their FULL weight behind the HW stadium project to the extent of even getting Lord Hoyle to put pressure of the minister involved (John Prescott).

As far as capacity is concerned I would have preferred 20K as we should have built in growth there. Dire are finding out to their cost that they cannot afford to fill in their corners of the ground now as the cost post the original stadium build is a lot higher than if they had been built into the original build.