The Guardian took to their favourite sport of West Ham bashing again on Sunday. Senior researcher at the Directory of Social Change, Rachel Cain wrote an article which appeared to blame West Ham for a short fall in charity funding.
She wrote “As West Ham United kick off a new season in the Olympic Stadium where the nation cheered Mo Farah and Usain Bolt in the World Athletics Championships this summer, few will be aware that this fabulous venue, now the London Stadium, was partly funded by money intended for charities, which are still waiting for repayment.”
Back in 2007, the government raided millions from lottery funds to pay for the infrastructure of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. More than £400m of this money should have been distributed by the Big Lottery Fundin grants enabling charities to do vital work in communities.“In response to outrage from charities and MPs at the time, the then Labour government pledged to repay the £425m of funds after the sale of the Olympic assets. This promise was reaffirmed by successive coalition and Conservative governments”.
Now for the reality for Mrs Cain: The London 2012 Olympics was budgeted at £9.29 Billion of which £8.77 billion was spent by the time the games were completed. Some of this was funded by the National Lottery to the tune of £425m but that was not dedicated to the £486m it cost to build the London Stadium so why only mention the stadium in the article?
What the article doesn’t mention is a total of 438 Olympic and Paralympic athletes which have been Lottery-funded since 1997 with a total of £2.2billion contributed to them. No mention of charity funds being redirected to Athletics though or a call to pay their funding back to charities.
Blaming West Ham for the shortage of the charity funding is a cheap shot by Cain, least we forget, it is not our Stadium! It is owned by the tax payer as everyone loves to remind us and we rent it for 25 days per year at a cost £100,000 per day.
I am not sure Lottery players care a fig about where the money goes, they just want to buy a chance in landing the jackpot.
Every story about the London Stadium in the media loves to beat up West Ham as some kind of blood sport when in reality, the stadium would have remained empty and a white elephant had West Ham not bid.
I am Season Ticket Holder in West stand lower at the London Stadium and before that, I used to stand in the Sir Trevor Brooking Lower Row R seat 159 in the Boleyn Ground and in the Eighties I stood on the terraces of the old South Bank. I am a presenter on the West Ham Podcast called MooreThanJustaPodcast.co.uk. A Blogger on WestHamTillIdie.com a member of the West Ham Supporters Advisory Board (SAB), Founder of a Youtube channel called Mr West Ham Football at http://www.youtube.com/MrWestHamFootball,
I am also the associate editor here at Claret and Hugh.
Life Long singer of bubbles! Come on you Irons!
Follow me at @Westhamfootball on twitter
Sean, I love your articles, because they’re laced with figures and facts that help us all to understand how things really are. Be a gent though, and proof read before you post, because your mistakes sometimes make it difficult to understand what you’re referring to. Cheers, chap! 🙂
Aside from that, I fear Mrs Cain won’t ever find this article, or care about its existence. She has more columns to fill with garbage today. So, how do we get her, or her editor to listen?
Well the answer seems obvious doesn’t it ; Move the Athletics to Birmingham and sell the OS/LS to West Ham . If that means the Davids selling up then so be it . Any new owners would most certainly want to own the stadium instead of renting it for 25 days a year .
You can’t call somewhere home if you only live there 25 days a year . In its present format the LS is pretty much useless as a Football Stadium anyway . Blaming West Ham for striking a deal is rather rediculous, especially as West Ham are no real winners in the arrangement . No Pubs , Long walks , Poor transport , Poor seating and Poor proximity to the pitch . But because we are West Ham United the Fans turn out regardless . If we played on Table Top mountain we would turn out to support our Club . Seems like a lot of jealous
People are forever cracking the same old , tired horse which the Guardian is only too happy to print whilst only telling a smitting of the truth .
Sean, enough said. You are spot on. Too often people/journalists like to spout off on some populist rant with no regard to the inconvenience of Fact or The Truth. It was the same during the Sheffield United/Carlos Tevez witch hunt of West Ham where cool heads were required to tell the pitch fork wielding mob where to get off. Unfortunately, they were nowhere to be seen and the apologists won. This is exactly the same situation. The problem is that ‘upstart’ West Ham dared to challenge its position in the natural order of the footballing universe. Naughty, naughty. It needs people like you to put the record straight, push back and rebuff every time these falsehoods are peddled. Otherwise they become accepted wisdom, then ‘fact’. So, thank you for your clarity.
Just read an article on the KUMB blog site . It actually made me feel sick .
[ sorry C&H , but I couldn’t sign in nor do I subscribe to KUMB and so I feel I should say something on here instead]
KUMB ; Paul Walker wrote , or rather asked this question of the David’s : ” what have you done today to make us feel proud ? ” .
His continual reference to Bobby Moore whilst mentioning the lamentable description of our owners as : D###o Brothers all in the same article was very disappointing .
We all know and Love the respect Bobby Moore has at West Ham but , to accuse the Davids of dragging our club down the sewers of porn whilst using Bobby’s name as a moral ruler was disgusting . Sporting Lisbon ( sporting ? ) aren’t exactly angels either . All of Thier dealings are notoriously filled with controversy .
Mr’s Sullivan & Gold have never denied where the money came from and to my knowledge have never publicized it . ….. But for Paul Walker to come out and write that very damaging article is extremely Anti West Ham . All he has done in effect is stuff the reputation of this Great Club that he claims he Loves further into the sewer .
There are a great many Football ( and other sports ) Club owners with far more dodgy past history’s than our present owners . It was a very well written and articulate article . Must have taken ages to piece it together so well as to Damage our reputation with such gusto .
Again , please accept my apologies for using this forum to comment on another .
Its the Guardian, what do you expect? One of the most, if not the most, biased out of touch papers going. Its as bad as the sport for facts and most of is it opinion pieces. A paper going down the drain very quickly, good riddance
Just read it Kevin. What a load of thinly disguised criticism of the board. All under the guise of pretending to care what european opinion is. He says that every time Sporting point to how our owners made their money we are brought down further and denigrated more in the eyes of europe. But he belabours the same point relentlessly. does he not do the same damage then? Whilst looking down on the owners one might ask if he’s ever seen a naughty film, looked at a nude woman,any of his family ever bought pretty underwear, ever looked at the Sun or Star or News Of The World. No good condemning the vendors whilst being one of the buyers. Iwonder if we had progressed to european football every year and been top five in the premier league on a regular basis,would he still be villifying our owners in such a sly way?
The Guardian took to their favourite sport of West Ham bashing again on Sunday. Senior researcher at the Directory of Social Change, Rachel Cain wrote an article which appeared to blame West Ham for a short fall in charity funding.
Sean, I love your articles, because they’re laced with figures and facts that help us all to understand how things really are. Be a gent though, and proof read before you post, because your mistakes sometimes make it difficult to understand what you’re referring to. Cheers, chap! 🙂
Aside from that, I fear Mrs Cain won’t ever find this article, or care about its existence. She has more columns to fill with garbage today. So, how do we get her, or her editor to listen?
Well the answer seems obvious doesn’t it ; Move the Athletics to Birmingham and sell the OS/LS to West Ham . If that means the Davids selling up then so be it . Any new owners would most certainly want to own the stadium instead of renting it for 25 days a year .
You can’t call somewhere home if you only live there 25 days a year . In its present format the LS is pretty much useless as a Football Stadium anyway . Blaming West Ham for striking a deal is rather rediculous, especially as West Ham are no real winners in the arrangement . No Pubs , Long walks , Poor transport , Poor seating and Poor proximity to the pitch . But because we are West Ham United the Fans turn out regardless . If we played on Table Top mountain we would turn out to support our Club . Seems like a lot of jealous
People are forever cracking the same old , tired horse which the Guardian is only too happy to print whilst only telling a smitting of the truth .
Agreed , sell it to us; we can then knock it down and build a football stadium in it’s place!
The Guardian, can quite frankly, f*** off.
Sean, enough said. You are spot on. Too often people/journalists like to spout off on some populist rant with no regard to the inconvenience of Fact or The Truth. It was the same during the Sheffield United/Carlos Tevez witch hunt of West Ham where cool heads were required to tell the pitch fork wielding mob where to get off. Unfortunately, they were nowhere to be seen and the apologists won. This is exactly the same situation. The problem is that ‘upstart’ West Ham dared to challenge its position in the natural order of the footballing universe. Naughty, naughty. It needs people like you to put the record straight, push back and rebuff every time these falsehoods are peddled. Otherwise they become accepted wisdom, then ‘fact’. So, thank you for your clarity.
Just read an article on the KUMB blog site . It actually made me feel sick .
[ sorry C&H , but I couldn’t sign in nor do I subscribe to KUMB and so I feel I should say something on here instead]
KUMB ; Paul Walker wrote , or rather asked this question of the David’s : ” what have you done today to make us feel proud ? ” .
His continual reference to Bobby Moore whilst mentioning the lamentable description of our owners as : D###o Brothers all in the same article was very disappointing .
We all know and Love the respect Bobby Moore has at West Ham but , to accuse the Davids of dragging our club down the sewers of porn whilst using Bobby’s name as a moral ruler was disgusting . Sporting Lisbon ( sporting ? ) aren’t exactly angels either . All of Thier dealings are notoriously filled with controversy .
Mr’s Sullivan & Gold have never denied where the money came from and to my knowledge have never publicized it . ….. But for Paul Walker to come out and write that very damaging article is extremely Anti West Ham . All he has done in effect is stuff the reputation of this Great Club that he claims he Loves further into the sewer .
There are a great many Football ( and other sports ) Club owners with far more dodgy past history’s than our present owners . It was a very well written and articulate article . Must have taken ages to piece it together so well as to Damage our reputation with such gusto .
Again , please accept my apologies for using this forum to comment on another .
I started reading it kevin and got as far as..
;I am sure the 500+ clubs who play in European competition probably didn’t know anything about the lurid past of our owners, but they do now;
Lurid past of our owners pmsl.As soon as i got that far i decieded it was sensationalist tripe.Sure enough he used to be an ex journo so enough said.
If they watched our games they’d see how charitable our team is nobody else in the league give more away!
Its the Guardian, what do you expect? One of the most, if not the most, biased out of touch papers going. Its as bad as the sport for facts and most of is it opinion pieces. A paper going down the drain very quickly, good riddance
Just read it Kevin. What a load of thinly disguised criticism of the board. All under the guise of pretending to care what european opinion is. He says that every time Sporting point to how our owners made their money we are brought down further and denigrated more in the eyes of europe. But he belabours the same point relentlessly. does he not do the same damage then? Whilst looking down on the owners one might ask if he’s ever seen a naughty film, looked at a nude woman,any of his family ever bought pretty underwear, ever looked at the Sun or Star or News Of The World. No good condemning the vendors whilst being one of the buyers. Iwonder if we had progressed to european football every year and been top five in the premier league on a regular basis,would he still be villifying our owners in such a sly way?