

The Emirates Stadium,
Arsenal
v Dinamo Zagreb, Champions League Qualifying Round
Wednesday, August 23rd,
8.05pm
By Colin Peel
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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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