So over the last couple of weeks, Fulham have finally taken the shackles off the person who write their PR guff, but unfortunately it’s to explain in the past tense what people were asking to be told over the last six months when it was current and we still held out hope of playing once more at the Cottage. The first concrete change came in Fayed’s statement of December 23 2002, which was the first time he publicly acknowledged that returning to the Cottage was not priority number one anymore.
Now, after much FUD has been spread by all sides, Fulham explains exactly why the costs of redeveloping the ground had risen from the initial estimate of 60m pounds to around 100m pounds.
The problem the Cottage faces is that it is in a unique position. There are still many other grounds in the middle of residential areas (though a lot fewer than ten years ago), but ground like Anfield are not surrounded by houses worth about a million pounds each on one side and a river on the other side, which provides a unique set of political and environment restrictions that we’ve known about for 15 years or more.
And the fact that the statement is written in the past tense only goes to prove that painful as it might be, it’s time to look elsewhere. The only alternative is that we get relegated and require lower wage bills and seats fixed to the existing terracing. Some choice.