All Fizz and No Bang: The National Stadium is NOT open!

What is  it about the unshakeable connection between the nouns ‘stadium’ ‘sporting event’ and ‘cock up’? Answers on a post card please. Or better yet, reduce our carbon footprint and comment here. Yes, Poland’s very own contribution to the Ozymandian odyssey of Humankind’s sporting infrastructure incompetence is the national stadium based in Warsaw. (Unless you’re the Chinese, in which case you’ll be incapable of building a Polish road to any decent quality, but will be able to produce a passable digitally enhanced and utterly repressed Olympics).

Supervised chaos forewith...

Whilst other cities in Poland have quietly got on with building and opening their stadia, Warsaw’s has been beset by all manner of problems. Some have mooted it might have been better to stick with the 1920s version which housed a flea market. Sadly nowadays you have to travel considerably further afield to buy your AK-47 and fake Russian cigarettes (Targówek, in case you were wondering) and in the venerable market’s place lies the workmanlike National Stadium.

I’m not one for aesthetics, I prefer function over form on every occasion, but there are certain object de vie which require a little visual salad dressing. No court should be without some kind of heraldic symbol, for example. In England no hospital is without its corresponding fast food joint. Wait, that’s not visual salad dressing, that’s yet another triumph of capitalism over common sense, but I digress...

The point I’m getting at is that the national stadium is nothing impressive, visually speaking. I much prefer the one in Gdansk – which is a powerful statement of local identity and sticks in the memory. The national stadium looks like a man from B&Q has done his best on an afternoon off. Yeah, some red and white panels’ll do ey bay gum.

Anyway after various disasters along the way, the stadium is almost done. Except it’s not. I read in Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading sensible paper, that it’s quite possible the forthcoming match between Legia and Wisła Kraków might still be cancelled, on the grounds that the crowd monitoring systems are not yet ready.

Which didn’t stop every news outlet under the sun, and maybe a few positioned behind, to say that  last Sunday’s open air (or maybe open-bloody-freezing-air) concert complete with fireworks marked the opening ceremony of the new stadium and the completion of works.

Au contraire, my dead tree press friends. The real test of any stadium is when its full to the brim with men who in any other age would be gouging each others’ entrails out with pikestaffs and loading trebuchets with furious gusto. Until the stadium has hosted a fusball game, it is nothing. A few thousand turning up to see Lady Pank revived with silver foil emergency blankets and cocoa is no test at all.

The view from my old window in Powiśle

I’m biased, because I’m desperate to see the Legia game there – particularly as the first game there’ll be significant numbers of away fans at. But no-one seems to know what the hell is going on. I asked at the Legia ground and they said it was up to the Polish FA. In the paper they say it’s a Polish decision based on the stadium’s safety features. In Fakt, which is Poland’s version of the Sun, it seems to be up in the air as well. One thing’s for sure, when it is ready and the game is on, I’ll be documenting it for your reading pleasure. We may not be CNN, but when it comes to matters of football, Poland and Legia, we get our facts right all the time, most of the time.