When you look around the country at the number new stadiums, sports facilities, running tracks, 3Gs and various other leisure facilities it's embarrassing to then see the Wakefield District in comparison.
There are much smaller Cities than Wakefield not to mention Towns, even Villages and communities that have managed to provide state of the art facilities for the use of their professional and amateur sports clubs.
While our Council and its leader are allowed to hide behind the '3 Clubs in our area' excuse and wash their hands of any responsibility for the issue we will never improve our situation. It is quite simply pathetic on their part that nothing has been done in the WMDC for decades!
Other Councils have had the foresight to steer potential developer like Tesco, Asda for example, in the direction of a sports club and have insisted that any development includes a stadium etc. Wakefield on the other hand have missed that boat on a number of occasions and when the opportunity rose again they botched the agreement and allowed the Developers legal team to run rings around them. Now our inglorious Council leader has washed his hands of the affair rather than bringing pressure on the developer to do the right thing, the conspiricy theorist in me wants to ask why?
I'll make this prediction, unless we are the beneficiaries of some philanthropist we will not achieve any significant progress with regards to a stadium. The results of which will be the loss of our SL status, a slow decline into Championship mediocrity and eventually past the point of no return a la Oldham, maybe even a Wakefield RU type cease of existence.
Very dark and depressing I know but I just don't see where the intervention is going to come from short of philanthropy.
Box and his co Councilors can point in as many directions as they like, they can blame the recession, claim we are a private company, use the 3 club excuse, say they've helped when really they've done little to nothing whatever!
It doesn't change the fact that they've allowed Wakefield to become a joke in comparison to the many other Cities and Towns around the country.