Carlisle United training ground plan needs fuel not frustration

Some of John Nixon’s comments about the local authority’s approach to the plan were met with a firm bat by council leader Colin Glover, who accused the United co-owner of “rhetoric” and “sabre-rattling”.

Blue Yonder, the notion of building a 12,000-seater stadium at Kingmoor Park, perished after a council report cast doubt on the viability of an enabling development which would have helped fund it.

And so it died, just like that, and a dozen years have since passed. Yet some things don’t change, it appears. This week club and council are at odds again, seemingly, over the pace of United’s proposed training ground project, whose location has not been publicly confirmed but may or may not be an anagram of The Meepshount.

And there has been more sabre-rattling from the top of Brunton Park. Owner Tom Piatak used an interview with the News & Star to express his frustration at what he implied was a succession of meetings at best, without dynamic action. Cumberland Council’s response is not yet known.

Plus ça change, perhaps. But also…not. There is a vital difference between the remarks of 12 years ago and those of this week, and it is the contrast between rattling the sabre without the strength to use it, and having some definite power behind you when you pick it up.

Carlisle, in 2012, couldn’t fund their own grand designs. As such, when Blue Yonder became Blue Never, there was little Nixon or his colleagues could do about it. And complaining about it was exactly that: words, frustration, exasperation, all dissolving into the atmosphere with everyone of the clear knowledge that United would have to pick their ball up, go home and stew on the matter, rather than flex their muscles or flash their chequebook at another option.

This time Carlisle are owned by people with clout. A multi-million pound training centre (possibly at the Heepshmount) will be funded, it’s expected, predominantly by equity investment, Tom Piatak said this week.

In other words: we’ve got the wherewithal, and we’re prepared to use it. A vision for change, as painted by the Piataks, is not just a sketch, at the mercy of many other people to colour it in. They are ready and set to make it happen.

And if United are to become the modern, thrusting club that everyone wishes them to be, and which everyone knows they haven’t been for so many years while others have flown past them, something like this has to occur, doesn't it?

Carlisle, training ad-hoc, negotiating favours, borrowing facilities…it cannot be the way indefinitely. Whatever one thinks of Paul Simpson’s management of 24th-placed United in League One this season, his eager eye for enhancing this particular part of the club has been on the money from day one.

Paul Simpson's vision to enhance United has long included the idea of a new training ground (Image: Richard Parkes)

The Piataks know this, share this. And while one should never simply bulldoze an idea through simply by saying there isn’t a better one around at the precise moment, it’s still entirely reasonable to ask: where will a better one come from, on this?

Where will owners come from who aren’t the Piataks yet have all the money, and all the will, to invest in big projects like this, designed to upscale Carlisle United? Where, from the ether, will the other proposal emerge which fits the Blues out with a training ground for the 21st century at last, with well-equipped, expensive facilities and the wider feeling that something major is happening here at last; something which can be a beacon for the club and its city, rather than another reason for Carlisle to find drawbacks and problems in what they have on an asset level?

Where else is this opportunity going to come from, that is not the Piatak family with their energy and wealth and plans and, it seems very clear, their impatience to get things done on a large scale?

This is not a cocktail United have known very often before. It may be that some are historically unsure about drinking from it. Again, though, it must be asked: what’s the alternative? Carlisle’s proposals die in red tape, pedestrian meetings, opaque uncertainties, and what’s next?

Another facility somewhere else, no doubt – the Piataks won’t let the grass grow, if the Mountsheep plan is dashed – but it risks a certain souring, to some degree, of the idea that these people, these Americans with their passion and full-frontal desire to improve Carlisle United, will find open doors everywhere they go.

Little in deals such as the one United are seeking are straightforward. Yet to paint Tom Piatak as someone naïve to this would be highly naïve itself: this logistics entrepreneur, accustomed to doing deals and moving matters on much larger scales than this. Carlisle’s owner will be far from blind to the administrative process. Its pace, its grey areas, though…those parts will have been calculated before he called them out.

We might not be talking once-in-a-lifetime with this precise plan – the Piataks look to have more stamina than that – but why would anyone not, without large and fundamental objection, embrace something like this? Why would it be allowed to drift into a thicket of uncertainties and slowness and meetings about meetings, instead of making every proactive part of it possible?

It does not take close inspection to see this as a generational moment, something transformative. Fred Story, the former Blues owner whose contracting firm is working on major East Stand developments at Brunton Park, said this week: “Carlisle as a city should be so grateful to the Piatak family for what they are doing.”

Note the key aspect of that: as a city. Not just as a club. We all benefit from a United that’s meeting, at long last, its historic potential. Those holding the key to that dusty old door must give it every chance.