Can London do anything right?

As certain as night follows day, you can guarantee that something won't quite be right in the capital.

It seems that our friends in the big smoke can't do anything right, especially anything that happens to be a major project designed to show the world just how good it is.
In recent years, the city has somehow managed to make seemingly simple tasks into catastrophic financial disasters. First, they struggled to pitch a really big circular tent in Grenwich and even now, six years on, the projects founders are still scracthing their heads asking "What is it for again?" So, the start of the new millenium saw London throw £540m down the swanny but after that, you'd think they'd be more careful.
Well no, next came Wembley.

If you thought the Millenium Dome fiasco would instill some sanity and organisation into the plans, think again.
Firstly, nobody knew where to put the new national stadium. The FA wanted it in London. Anyone who lived outside London wanted it in the Midlands and Bradford Council wanted it in Bradford on the basis that there was nothing else there. Nobody listened to Bradford though. In fact, I imagine that the Birmingham and London campaigners told the representative from West Yorkshire just to sit in the corner and stop disturbing a serious discussion, but you can't fault them for trying.

As with anything worth doing, it had to be in the place where only those all important Londoners wanted it, soWembley it was although you can't help think that if Britain needed an ennema, the cockneys would want that too.

After the old Wembley was retired in a not so graceful manner in October 2000, the bulldozers moved in to start work on the new Wembley. That is, after the FA found some builders dumb enough to build the thing.
Firstly, they couldn't decide if they wanted a running track. Football fans said no, but the lottery funders wanted one. So the designers came up with some half-arsed attempt where the runners could race on some kitchen tables which could be locked away when a football match was on. That should be interesting!
Then, money talks. Initially, the estimated cost for the new stadium stood at around £660m. That's around 3 times more than the new Stade de France just outside Paris, and 5 times that of the Millenium Stadium, just 150 miles away in Cardiff.
But as with all things in London, the cost shot up. The next figure quoted was £750m (somebody obviously forgot to carry the one or something) but nobody seemed to mind, that was normal for a London project.

Anyway, the building contract was eventually awarded to a group of enthusiastic Aussies who quickly got to work and it looked "all systems go" for an FA Cup final in 2006. Well, no actually. Firstly the contractors announced that they had another £75m "descrepancy" and as far as I know, a team of Australia's finest are still looking for it behinf the sofa. Then the electricians went on strike and the work got delayed for the again and again.
Yesterday, they claim that there is only a 70% chance of them meeting the hand-over date.

I was looking forward to heading down to Wembley for the 2006 Rugby League Challenge Cup Final, the first at the new Wembley. Thing is, I now have this nagging feeling that I'll be watching the first ever Cup Final to be played in a building site.

So, that's Wembley marked down as another capital screw-up, surely the London 2012 Olympics isn't going to make a hat-trick? Well, yes, it is.
Just a month after London was awarded the games, it announced that they'd miscalculated how much it would cost to dig a long square hole and fill it with water and that it infact would cost DOUBLE what they estimated.
"Forget the cost, the Olympics will enspire the nations youth to get into sport" cry the games supporters, not least the government. Wrong again. This happens to be the same government that claimed in 2002 that:

“hosting major events is not an effective, value for money method of achieving a sustained increase in mass participation”

Still, you can't blame them for trying.

Stay tuned, because the Olympics could be the biggest cock-up yet.