I was just flipping through my Tweets a little earlier and this one from the Birmingham Mail caught my eye:-

Mmmm, that doesn’t sound very good, does it? That sounds very much like the Olympic Organising Committee is kicking Villa Park to the curb for some reason, no? Whatever could be the problem?

Surprise, surprise, the headline doesn’t quite match the story. Second and third paragraphs (which is really where all tabloid articles start, the first paragraph is intended to summarize the contents that follow):-

Construction work being planned over the next few years at the Birmingham-based ground means it can no longer “commit fully” to hosting preliminary matches in the Olympic football tournament, said the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog).

Villa Park’s withdrawal was a joint decision between Locog and Aston Villa, which now opens up the chance for other Midlands clubs to become London venues, provided they can meet International Olympic Committee rules.

So nothing too sinister then, you may even find it reassuring that it appears a significant construction project is planned that possibly clashes with the Olympics.

I’m actually a little on the fence, but I’m definitely looking into the garden of good news on this one. The reason for not immediately jumping up and down with glee is that the renovation of the North Stand and the filling in of the corners at that end of the ground has been mooted since Randy Lerner acquired the club. Villa Park was rightly part of the successful London 2012 Olympics bid, which I presume meant that the project would receive some kind of grant funding. The initial plans were to add an extra 8,000 seats into the ground.

Now that Villa are apparently unable to commit to that plan it leaves, I think, one of only a few explanations. The more negative assumption might be that either the club cannot or will not fund their part of the reconstruction in time or perhaps they’re incapable of making a decision about how to proceed. In fairness, the latter has not been part of Lerner’s track record thus far. There’s been nothing but positive redevelopments of the ground since Randy came along. Making a decision does not seem to be a weakness of the current board.

The more positive assumption might be that the club has some very big plans indeed and they realise that it would be impossible to achieve them, or possibly impractical to try, before the Olympics. Maybe, just maybe, they see the filling in of the corners as a patch-up job and they wish to do something a bit more spectacular. I’m just speculating here.

As I’m generally a “glass half-full” type of person, I’m leaning towards being very pleased to hear this news, although a little disappointed that A) Villa Park won’t be seen on TV screens around the world as part of the Olympics and B) the stadium redevelopment won’t be happening quite as quickly as might have been expected.

From a marketing and brand building perspective, although probably intangible, it could only have been beneficial for the ground to have featured during the Olympics. I think it’s fair to assume that the board took this into consideration when coming to their decision.

The bottom line is that the club would only be motivated to make this decision because of something either very good, or something very bad, I don’t see much middle ground.

And finally… this story has at least reminded me of something I’ve had on the back burner for a while. Some time ago I made contact with villapark2011 on Flickr who has created some neat artist’s impressions of what Villa Park might look like after the expansion. Here’s a couple that caught my eye, but head on over to their Flickr page to see some others.

Whatever the motivation behind Villa’s withdrawal from the Olympics, it’s probably a bad news day for villapark2011. They may well have to go back to the drawing board, quite literally, but they will definitely have to reconsider the user name!!