White Hart Lane

As the political classes and the media camp-out in the epi-centre of the London riots in Tottenham, l have to admit that l’ve only travelled up to Tottenham once a year for a certain fixture at White Hart Lane – Spurs Vs Man Utd. Now that may well be good enough for me as an away fan but residents of Tottenham need their area to offer them a lot more and if Spurs leave Tottenham, then the area will be losing a major asset which places it on the map and perhaps the only attraction which it has to offer those of us from other parts of town.

While the club is probably the biggest private land owner in Tottenham, it also has a CEO Daniel Levy, actively pursuing moving the club elsewhere shown by their Olympic bid and its subsequent legal challenge of the OPLC decision to negotiate with West Ham. What seems to be troubling the club are the transport links to the ground, or more accurately, the lack of good links especially by tube. So what’s the problem with extending the Victoria line to Northumberland Park? The depot for the tubes along the Victoria line actually go pass the side of the ground at Northumberland Park. The sticking point with this option appears to be the cost and logistics of a footbridge which could accommodate the huge numbers from the side of the station to the stadium on match days especially evenings.

However, not long ago, the LDA provided for a footbridge over Wembley Stadium rail station to get to the new Stadium at a cost of about £11 million so why can’t something similar be done to plug the gap in funding for a footbridge at Northumberland Park? This I believe, would be a small price to pay to keep the club in its neighbourhood, which without it, would suffer a huge gap in its urban fabric. Otherwise we are in danger of seeing Tottenham being lost on the map of London, losing its historic identity and becoming more renowned for the riots and looting of 2011.

I welcome the proposed Arcelor Mittal Tower in the Olympic Park, which the Mayor announced to the world yesterday, and feel it will be a great draw during and after the Games themselves in 2012. However, while issues of the cost and planning were dealt with at the launch’s question and answer session yesterday, l went away not quite sure who will end up owning the Tower.

If the number of Chinese visitors to the Bird’s Nest in Beijing is anything to go by, then we can expect thousands of people daily visiting the Mittal Tower, drawn by the prospect of seeing the Olympic Park and beyond from its vantage point at the top. l am sure an attraction like this, priced in the right way, will generate a more than steady income to cover the management and maintenance costs. As it appears that most of the cost of erecting the tower will be underwritten by Mr Mittal’s generosity, we won’t have huge loans to service.

Mr Mittal will get his tower and name in the London skyline for perpetuity. So hopefully he will agree to hand ownership over to a body that will use the income from the tower to subsidise other activities and events on the Olympic site that aren’t necessarily going to attract quite so many visitors and ensure that they are kept going long after the Olympic Games bandwagon has left town.

An examination of the ODA’s accounts for 2008-9 (pdf here pp.76-7) reveals that its chief executive earned a basic salary of £384,000 and its chairman £250,000 (for a three-day week), while salaries for the ODA’s seven directors were between £192,000 and £282,000. (This compares with the prime minster’s annual salary of £195,000.) In addition the chief executive received a bonus of £209,566, while the directors got between £38,000 and £48,000 each. Total bonuses came to £2.1 million, up from £1.7 million the previous year, out of a total wage bill of £19 million for 202 staff.

Now l have been supportive of holding the 2012 Olympics in London right from the beginning, but clearly some people are doing very well for themselves out of it. In tough times for all of us, they need to show more restraint.

Today at the launch of Client Earth outside City Hall, I expressed concern that London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics may have been undermined by Boris Johnson’s regressive environmental decisions.

The International Olympic Committee’s evaluation of London’s bid (pdf here) expressed concern about London’s “increasing levels of ozone pollution” but said that “legislation and actions now in place, such as the ‘low emission zone’ and ‘congestion charge’, are aimed at correcting that trend and ensuring all air pollutants are within World Health Organisation and EU target levels by 2010″.

Since this evaluation was made, Boris Johnson has been elected Mayor, and London’s measures to tackle its poor air quality and ozone pollution have been rolled back. The Congestion Charge Zone will be halved in size and the third phase of the Low Emission Zone, which was due to prevent the most polluting vehicles from entering Greater London, has been indefinitely suspended.

A recent London Assembly report into the city’s air quality, Every Breath You Take (pdf here), found that it could be responsible for up to 3,500 premature deaths and 12,000 children being hospitalised for respiratory failure. It has been reported that the Government is considering countermanding the Mayor because his actions may have undermined their fight against a possible fine of £300 million for failure to meet EU standards on air quality.

It’s bad enough that over three thousand Londoners have their lives cut short each year because of the state of our air. The last thing we want is for this still to be an issue when the world comes here in three years time – as it was in Beijing and Athens. If the Mayor continues down this road, that sadly could well be the case. At the least, the Mayor should now reverse his short-sighted decision to cancel the next phase of the Low Emission Zone.

Last Sunday, on a glorious evening at Lords, with its new floodlights and its immediate neighbourhood brought alive in manner that is not customary in St John’s Wood, we saw the successful conclusion of the ICC Twenty20 cricket World Cup, with Pakistan beating the Sri Lankans. Half of the tournament had been staged in London, with matches divided between the Oval and Lords, and it was fitting that it should close at the ground where it had opened less than three weeks earlier, with the unexpected victory of Holland over England in a dramatic final over.

That opening match boded well for the events that would unfold over the next few weeks. The tournament featured fielding and catching that was routinely breathtaking; umpires who got most things right; the example of Ireland giving encouragement to amateur cricketers all around the world; and England’s victory in the parallel women’s tournament. Completed in less than 18 days, the competition left the fans wanting more.

Quality was the key, and we saw the return of traditional skills like wicket keeping and spin bowling in all its variations, as teams realised that the biff-bang approach doesn’t always work. And London showed what an excellent sporting venue it is, with fans of every nation embracing and enjoying Twenty20 – rather more so than some of the more conservative MCC members, it must be said.

London is the historic home of cricket, and the “spirit of the game” now enshrined in the official rules by the MCC embodies the Olympic ideal of fair play. So hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 can provide the capital with an ideal opportunity to showcase cricket, allowing it to reach a much wider global audience, while in return increasing the appeal of the Olympics amongst cricketing nations that don’t engage as fully with traditional athletics.

Leading cricketers such as Gilchrist, Waugh, Dravid and others have been promoting the inclusion of Twenty20 cricket as a “full” Olympic sport in the 2020 Olympics, under the catchy slogan “Twenty20 for 2020”. As a prelude to that it would be useful if cricket were part of the Games in London 2012 in some form.

In the past, the host Olympic nation has introduced a “demonstration” sport as part of the Games, with the aim that this should become an official Olympic sport in future years. This changed with the removal of demonstration sports at the Beijing Olympics, so host cities are now showcasing local sports as part of the “Cultural Olympiad”.

During the Beijing Olympics “Wushu”, an exhibition and full contact sport derived from traditional Chinese martial arts, was incorporated into the Cultural Olympiad. So if the Chinese can have Wushu, l can’t see why we shouldn’t have cricket in its Twenty20 version incorporated into the London Olympics, given that it is our summer cultural game.

Cricket has been part of the Games in the past – it was last played at the 1900 Olympics, when Great Britain beat France. So with a successful Twenty20 World Cup concluded last Sunday, isn’t it time to think about having cricket returning to the Olympics for 2012?

First published in West End Extra, 26 June 2009