Birmingham City got their League One campaign off to a start with a 1-1 draw with Reading at St Andrew’s on Saturday. A late penalty scored by Alfie May rescued a point for a Blues team that struggled to create clear cut chances despite having the lion’s share of possession.
Tuesday night saw Birmingham City hold their second Open House event which carried the theme of “Ambition”. The event was an opportunity for Chairman Tom Wagner and CEO Garry Cook to share plans for the club over the next five or six seasons including the outline of the move to the Birmingham Wheels Site.
On Thursday afternoon councillors on Birmingham City Council’s Cabinet Committee for property will meet to discuss and potentially accept a report to sell a chunk of land in Bordesley to an outside party. While there has been no official confirmation as to who the purchaser of the land is, it has been widely reported that it is Birmingham City who are to buy the land for the purpose of a new stadium.
Tuesday night was a good night to be a Blues fan. The weather held off, the team finally managed to break its scoring duck and Tony Mowbray secured the first home win in the league for Birmingham City since November 25th. All in all it made for a good warm up for what appears to be main event on Saturday when Sunderland roll into town.
Despite all the work going on around St Andrew’s in recent months, there has been consistent gossip among Blues fans about the potential for a move to a new stadium. This has been fuelled by people talking about the redevelopment of Birmingham Wheels Park and the potential to build there.
Birmingham City released an update to fans on Thursday evening, confirming plans to proceed with the next stage of repairs of the St Andrew’s Stadium. The update confirmed that work would be done to remove the pre-cast concrete units from both the lower Tilton and Kop during the World Cup break.
The continued efforts by senior staff and board members to regain the trust and confidence of Blues fans continue apace. On Wednesday afternoon pics emerged of the exterior of the Kop stand being covered in new acrylic wrap featuring images of past players and past glories.
The second article in my series looking at where Birmingham City have spent money in recent years focuses on St Andrew’s stadium. The stadium has been the centre of news throughout most of the current regime’s tenure due to the sale of the stadium to Birmingham City Stadium Ltd to get around P&S rules; the closure and partial reopening of the Tilton and Kop stands due to structural issues and the ground share deal with Coventry City FC.
Back in August, I’d hoped that by the time of the October international break we’d be close to knowing when the final work on the Kop and Tilton stands would be at St Andrew’s. Yet here we are not even sure that the upper part of the Kop will be open for the visit of Swansea on October 23.
It’s now less than 48 hours until Birmingham City play Derby County and Blues season ticket holders still don’t know if they actually have a ticket for the game or not. Although we’ve had confirmation from the club that the works for the upper Tilton stand have been verbally signed off, it appears that a paperwork issue is now holding up the final sign-off of the safety certificate to open that part of the stand.
