The Emirates Stadium, Arsenal
v Dinamo Zagreb, Champions League
Qualifying Round
Wednesday, August
23rd, 8.05pm
By Colin Peel
| Through a contact who
keeps two memberships of Arsenal FC, I managed
to see the Champions League Qualifier with
Dinamo Zagreb on August 23, the second
competitive game at the Emirates. The game
wasn't a sell out but
the club did not offer a general sale for the
2,000 or so unsold seats. Going completely
against the Arsenal Travel Plan, I drove to
London and parked on Stroud Green Road, just to
the North of Finsbury Park tube. Before 7pm,
this is pay & display and a max stay of one
hour (making it useless
for day games) but it's unrestricted after 7pm
and, unlike the local side roads, not subject to
residents' parking controls. Arriving
from the North, the Emirates Stadium site is
announced by the ugly,
unsympathetic 'Highbury House' on
Drayton Park, which houses (another) club
shop and (another) restaurant built
above an access bridge into the site.
The bridge brings you out at the North end
of the ground, which has much less
circulation space than the South end. We
took a walk around the stadium perimeter but
this turned out to be a mistake as
the heavens opened and the absence of
cover became apparent. One unusual feature
outside the stadium is an austere toilet
block on each corner of the site.
When
members buy their 'tickets', the right to
get in is remotely programmed onto the
membership card. The card is slotted in to
the turnstile (unlike Manchester City's
'proximity' mechanism) and a green light
indicates that the turnstile has been
released. Presumably a steward has to
intervene if a red light is triggered.
This rather unromantic system means that
instead of 'getting a ticket', you are
simply buying 'access rights' to the game.
Since very few games are expected to go to
a general sale, and memberships cost at
least £30, the system should stop ticket
touts in their tracks.
Our seats
were in the upper North-East quadrant, an
acceptable climb from the lower concourse.
The upper concourse is quite spacious, and
you are never more than a few yards from a
screen showing 'Arsenal TV', the club's
in-house channel. There are plenty of
catering outlets, but each one serves
something different, giving you a choice
from bagels (£5), burgers (£4), pizza
(£4), pies (an astonishing £4) and beer
(£3.20). A nice touch are the counters set
up against the external glass walls to
rest your food and drink whilst gazing out
over the old ground and the gathering
crowd.
I'll
separate the seating bowl from the roof
when describing the stadium. The
'saddleback' shape of the bowl has two
main benefits; one is technical in that
the highest seats (on the sides and
ends) should be no further from the
centre circle than the lowest seats in
the corner, despite the optical illusion
that the corners are nearer, but the
other is purely aesthetic. However, in
most saddleback stadiums (such as
Manchester City and Bolton) the
aesthetics are reinforced by the roof
following the shape of the stands,
whereas the Emirates does the opposite.
The complex roof shape slopes in towards
the centre from the perimeter ring but
also bows downwards at the centre due to
the shape of the exposed trusses.
Personally, I really dislike it. It also
made me wonder how rainfall drains off
the roof, especially when water came
cascading over the front edge of the
North-West roof section in the
second-half. Having said that, the clear
span of the roof when you are sat
beneath it, especially at the ends, is
awesome.
Some
other points of interest are the
unusually large size of the
(comfortable) seats, the excellent video
screens (assuming you can see them), the
almost-total absence of branding in the
stadium bowl, ventilation
gaps between the bowl and the
roof, and a quite excellent PA
system which demonstrates how to be
perfectly audible without deafening
your audience. Sadly for Arsenal the
home fans were anything but deafening
and were easily outsung by their
Croatian visitors.
Getting out was straightforward
until hitting the severely congested
bridge back over the railway, but this
was nothing compared to the crush
between here and Arsenal tube station.
Nearer Finsbury Park there were some
unexplained crowd control measures put
in place by the Police but the delays
weren't serious and I was back up the M1
in good time.
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