Birmingham uncovered: Club Website on tour
Club Website hit the road last weekend, paying a visit to Birmingham on the first stage of our tour of some of the worst football facilities around the country.
Having found out that half of Club Website users have to put up with substandard facilities for their regular football - while many don’t even have any changing rooms to use - we decided to get out there and take a look for ourselves.
Birmingham was our first port of call and, bright and early last Sunday morning, we headed to Senneleys Park in the Bartley Green area of the city.
We'd heard a few dodgy things about the facilities and pitches at Senneleys so we weren’t expecting great things… and what we found lived right up to our expectations!
The changing room block in the middle of the park was a tired old building, covered in graffiti and looking generally run down. Nothing too unusual for park buildings there but, to make matters worse, this particular building isn't even open at the moment.
Renovation work scheduled by Birmingham council for the summer has overrun well into the season, so we found the teams turning up for the morning’s games were forced to get changed in the car park. As it turned out, most of them needn’t have bothered as a combination of heavy overnight rain and poor drainage - another problem at Senneleys - meant waterlogged pitches put paid to most of the day's football at the park.
Darren Redmond, secretary of Paschendale FC - the home side in the one game that did go ahead - is just one of the frustrated footballers to use Senneleys Park. His club pay over £500 a season to play at the park, a price which - according to Birmingham Council's pricing structure - includes the use of changing facilities.
Instead, they get no access to running water, nowhere to leave their possessions during the game and have the dubious pleasure of getting changed under a tree next to the pitch.
"We are actually paying for a facility that we can’t use,” Darren told Club Website.
"It's disappointing as we go back to a pub that put food on afterwards and we’re all covered in mud, so it’s not ideal."
Not ideal? With a game played out on a bog of a pitch leaving most players caked in mud, this might just qualify as the understatement of the season!
Maybe Darren has become de-sensitised to the state of the facilities at Senneleys Park? It's a possibility, as it certainly sounds like they weren't much better before they closed.
Darren told us: “It was a place that you could get changed in and that’s about all. There were no facilities to keep personal items locked up and simple things that you expect like toilets are not available.” A sorry state of affairs but, unfortunately, one far too common in towns and cities right across the country.
To rub salt into the wound for Paschendale, they lost the game 5-3 to HG United. Despite the mud bath on which the game was played, however, it served up some cracking Sunday League entertainment for those of us watching from the touchlines.
The Club Website team served up tea and coffee for those suffering in the cold – substitutes and spectators alike - whilst grabbing photos and videos of our trip to Senneleys Park to add to our 'dodgy dossier', before moving on to check out our second venue of the day.
"Sennleys Park is a palace compared to the shack we have just up the road in Kings Norton."
That was the message posted on website by Bournville Athletic under 13s/14s manager and Club Website user Michael O’Rourke after he'd heard about our trip to Birmingham, so we knew we just had to swing by to take a look.
We're glad that Michael contacted us as what we found was pretty shocking. The only facilities in Kings Norton Park are nothing more than graffiti-covered huts that are in terrible state. The word "shack" just about covers it.
The huts have no electrity or running water and so offer little more than just storage for Bournville Warriors, who use the park for their teams from under 6s right up to under 17s.
Michael told us: "We've been trying to get the council to do repairs and have come up against a brick wall every time. The huts are in a really bad state and we've got nowhere with getting any repairs done in nearly 10 years now."
"We've asked for them to put the water and the electric on, but even that's become a problem because the water leaks and the electrics don't work fully. It's just problem after problem and they just complain about the cost of the repairs."
The club spend over £2,000 a season just to rent the pitches at the park. Birmingham Council wanted a further £1,000 for the club to use the facilities but, as they amount to little more than storage facilities at the moment, the club have held firm. They would, however, prefer to pay extra for the facilities, provided they were worth using.
Michael said: "If the facilities were good enough, we'd quite happily pay to use them. The state they're in now, they are giving them to us for free, but we'd rather have good facilities and pay a bit of money towards it, so that we could use them properly."
"We'd much prefer to use them for changing rooms in bad weather conditions, so people can come and get changed and teams can meet up inside and even serve some tea and coffee in the winter, but with no electricity and water it's impossible."
That doesn't sound like too much to ask, but obviously there's a sticking point with the council somewhere and the club have been unable to get round it. This sort of situation is exactly why we started this facilities campaign, so we'll be picking this issue up with Birmingham Council and finding out exactly what is causing the issue.
All in all, it was an eye-opening day in Birmingham, but a very worthwhile one, all the same.
Keep your eye out for further updates on our facilities campaign over the coming days and weeks. As ever, we'll keep you up to date via the usual channels - on clubwebsite.co.uk and via our Facebook and Twitter pages.
As we retired to the Sports Cafe, we chewed the fat on what we'd just seen and everyone agreed that the day’s events had left us with a renewed determination to get something done about this important issue and to be a voice for our clubs right across the country!
Thanks to all of you who joined us Sunday to support the cause - and share a beer or two! It was great to meet you all and we hope to see you again soon.
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