A HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS!

WHAT’S it like building a football stadium?

- Matt BADCOCK

“Very stressful and very expensive – apart from that, great fun,” Cambridge City chairman Kevin Satchell says, dryly.

We’re sitting in a portacabin at the club’s new FWDIP Community Stadium in Sawston – a large village outside the university city – just four days before their more than 11-year wait to play a first-team match in their own home again is over.

To get to this point has been a saga of on, off and on again planning permission, legal battles, and groundshares with local clubs St Ives Town, Histon and back to St Ives.

“It’s not been an easy path,” media and communications director Sean Coxon says. “We had the legal battle originally about whether or not we could build at all. Then covid comes along and puts a three-year spanner in the works. Then the prices have all gone up. It’s not been your average stadium build.”

Countless meetings, obstacles to overcome from, at times, unhelpful, authorities and trying to maintain a senior football cub has not been easy.

The days of selling tickets in the bar at their former Milton Road home for a big FA Cup clash with MK Dons seem a lifetime ago.

“We’ve lived every day of it and the difficulties we’ve had,” general manager Alice Dewey says. “The hurdles we’ve had to overcome, the money that’s had to be spent to get to this stage and there’s still quite a bit to go. There’s probably still going to be hurdles thrown at us – there’s still the internal fit to happen – but we’ve lived every day of it and had the stress and emotions of that.

“To see this stadium sat here for so long and we now finally are getting supporters in to watch, it’s an exciting and proud moment. But also an emotional one.”