WHEN the grand plan to relocate Basingstoke Town from their current home to council-owned land at Old Common, in Eastrop, football club chairman Rafi Razzak said he hoped that the move would be completed by March 2014.

That was back in December 2011. In the three years since, and almost exactly a year after it had been hoped that the project would be finished, there has been plenty of political wrangling and behind-the-scenes talk, but it seems that the club may be back to square one.

Late last week, it was announced that the plan has been put on hold as Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council have decided that the entire scheme could be vulnerable to legal challenge. Nothing will now happen until the autumn at the earliest.

This simply isn’t good enough. Surely somebody inside the council’s vast planning department should have had the foresight to see that these legal problems could crop up. People opposing the plan certainly did.

Football clubs don’t tend to be looked upon with much sympathy, but in this situation it’s important to consider that the people from the club working on this proposal are all volunteers. They have given up many hours of their time, believing that the advice they were getting from the professionals at the council was right.

They have played the game all the way through, at significant cost to a club not exactly awash with money, and where has it got them?

If this had happened to a community group, people would be up in arms. Because it’s a football club that happens to be run by volunteers, nobody seems to care.

It’s been argued that Old Common should not be the chosen site. Of course nobody likes to see green space taken away, but every time I’ve been there, the place has been deserted. It’s hardly an oasis of green in a concrete jungle either. War Memorial Park is right next door, with plenty of space for people to walk their dogs.

Of course, if such a plan was devised for a patch of land near my house, I may feel differently, but in all honesty, wherever something like this is built, there will be local residents who are not happy about it.

The alternative side put forward by the opposition is at Basingstoke Leisure Park, next to Milestones. It’s a site that has been considered and dismissed in the past and I’d suggest that exactly the same thing will happen if and when it’s considered again in the autumn.

I simply don’t see how that space would be big enough to contain a 5,000 capacity stadium, while if anyone has any other bright ideas about bits of council-owned land that might be suitable, I’d urge them to come forward.

The football club’s problem is that the they are completely tied in with the council, needing all of the money raised from the sale of their current ground to build the new stadium. They cannot afford to pay for land as well.

Without the council on board, their only option would be to redevelop The Soccer AM Stadium, which we have been told in the past is not viable.

I always had my doubts that this project would ever get off the ground, but if that is the case, what happens next?

Town are having a fantastic season, flying high in the Vanarama Conference South. They have the ground grading needed to gain promotion, should they achieve it, but were they to remain in the Conference, they would need to carry out extensive, costly and logistically difficult work to pass furture inspections.

The club are looking into what they would need to do, preparing in case the new stadium plan does not go ahead, but it may be that some of the stipulations cannot be met at The Soccer AM Stadium.

It’s a total mess – and the council need to sort it out. If they don’t think they can help the club, they need to stop stringing them along.

There’s an election coming up and this is one of the issues that will be used as a political football over the coming months. Promising a community stadium may look good on a manifesto, but the club need to know whether it’s actually achievable, while candidates in Eastrop will promise to fight the proposal in order to win votes.

I suspect that the majority of people in the town want things to continue as they are, but that cannot happen.

What nobody wants is for the land that Town currently call home to be sold to developers, with the club ceasing to exist. Sadly, that could be a genuine prospect and if it happens, the council will have plenty to answer for.

Have your say on this issue using the comment box below or Tweet me @JBoymanGazette

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