Highbury and Islington and Finsbury Park stations will get upgrades rather than Holloway Road, according to an Islington Council spokesman.
Holloway Road station will be closed on match days.
In the Ashburton Grove planning agreements, Holloway Road was due a share of £7.5m. However estimates now are coming in at £60m for this station.
Current thinking is that more commuters use H&I and FP and they have more connections on match days.
Unless there is a request within five years, Arsenal are under no obligation to fund transport improvements.
The upgrading to Drayton Park has been delayed because WAGN has been replaced by FirstGroup.
The obvious anti-Arsenal biased article in the Evening Standard yesterday was wrong when it said: “the Underground improvements, too, were cancelled.”
The go-ahead to open the new stadium on time despite nearby residents complaining bitterly over road closures on match days was granted at a Council Committee meeting last week.
Fourteen streets will be closed around Ashburton Grove on police advice to safeguard emergency access and prevent potential clashes between fans. The Police would have refused to sign the Safety Certificate otherwise. Only three roads were closed off for Highbury games.
The closures last two hours before and an hour after games. The council agreement – on the casting vote of the Liberal Democrat chairwoman – to impose the road closures will be for an 18-month trial period, although procedures will be reviewed after five games.
Apparently Arsenal want to keep 25 per cent of fans within the new stadium for at least an hour after the final whistle by showing post-match TV coverage and offering discounted food and drink.
If anyone is interested in the technical/legal aspects of Ashburton Grove – there’s an article by one of the lawyers involved in the project, Stephen Edwards of Slaughter & May in this month’s Building Magazine.
Here’s an extract or two: “For a lawyer, it is difficult to imagine a more complex and challenging project. It had it all. Planning, compulsory purchase (including a judicial review of the issue of the CPO), real estate, commercial, state aid, public procurement, litigation, dealings with every government office imaginable – and construction. All of this was carried out against the background of non-recourse financing, whereby the debt providers only had access to the anticipated cash flows that would be produced by the new stadium rather than the club and its assets.”
“The construction contract was the key project document that enabled the club to raise the debt finance to construct the stadium on a non-recourse basis. As with Wembley, the construction contract started life as a JCT standard form with contractor design. As the financing developed, amendments were negotiated to convert it into a lump-sum, fixed-price, fixed-date “turnkey” contract where most of the construction and programme risk lay with the Sir Robert McAlpine, the contractor for the job.”
Corruption update:
It is all coming out now. Former Juve chief executive Antonio Giraudo said at the corruption trial: “All kinds of things go on in football: people give Rolexes to referees, people fix the accounts. What I’m saying is that this is an environment in which you have to protect yourself.”
The tribunal has said it aims to deliver its verdicts on July 10, the day after the World Cup final in Berlin. All the accused have denied wrongdoing.
Those found guilty can appeal, but the appeals process must be finished by July 27 — the deadline set by UEFA for the FIGC to submit the list of teams for next season’s Champions League and UEFA Cup competition.
Four separate criminal probes into the scandal are expected to reach the trial stage much later. State prosecutors are looking at different elements of the alleged web of corruption including illegal betting, false accounting, doping and transfer fraud.
Lazio and Milan were relegated to Serie B as a result of the last big scandal, involving betting among players in 1982.