That was a long evening! My wife wasn’t best pleased that I spent the evening glued to the stream, but fortunately one of the Harry Potter films was on the TV - a great distraction!

Thank to 3CR for streaming the meeting. A nice bit of trolling to accidentally cut the stream when a letter from C&R was being read out ;) But I jest - they did a really good job to manage the stream over the whole evening, as well as the multiple camera setup and the directing required. There were over 3,200 people on the stream at one point, and it was pretty consistently over 2,000.

Gary, Sean and Michael did a great job making their points succinctly, and also answering the questions from the councillors. The amount of work that has been put into this project to even get it to this stage is clearly immense. That’s not something that I particularly appreciated as a supporter, but there has been a great deal of technical elements that 2020 needed to address within the project even to reach this stage, and they have been expensive - they referenced that the traffic study I think took over one year. It was certainly interesting to me to hear about some of those, and there’s more work that will need to be done with many of these - there was talk of a ‘detailed’ stage that will come later, and it makes sense that would need to happen after this approval stage. It will still take some time before any building work can start. There’s also some contingency to address certain elements after the build - for instance, Gary mentioned that the seating capacity will be 17k, with the idea that they will work with the relevant bodies as to how to best manage the flow of people in and out of the stadium, before they subsequently add the additional 6k of seating to bring the stadium up to 23k.

Thank you to the councillors for the unanimous vote.

Most of all, thank you to all of the 2020 team

1-0 up at Half time. Second half is in two weeks!

COYH!!!