Dan Meis outlines his true feelings over what supporters say about Hill Dickinson Stadium

I just hope we have a team suited to grace that stadium.

Good on Chris Beesley for securing the interview but it really shows up the paucity of Echo journalism in that there is virtually no gratuitous journalistic bullshit content inserted to ruin it — it's all just Dan Meis talking.

And what a great interview it is!!!

To me, it's a big brown building with a silver roof and a few tiny silver badges on the corners. At night it looks nice but in the day looks like a warehouse, souless, our name is not even on it, wake up everyone.

But these things take time and with a little pressure from fan groups, I'm sure it will get done. And yes, it does look fantastic at night.

Can't wait for my first game there, especially the first one under the lights.

There are cosmetics that are being worked on and I see no reason why the crests can't be illuminated in blue.

As for multi use. Of course they will want to use it for non-football events for additional revenue.

Wembley, Tottenham, the Emirates, the Etihad and Old Trafford all do. Villa Park recently hosted Black Sabbath's last ever concert.

And the shop at the Everton stadium needs to be emblazoned with the club name and crest? I'm confident there won't be too many casual browsers wondering where the hell they are.

I'm all for classy and understated on the outside, with the in-your-face ‘shoutiness' reserved for the terracing.

I looks more like a multi-storey car park, although the new roof trusses are AC's colours.

It may annoy those on the waiting list but I fully understand the club wouldn’t want, potentially, big empty spaces for any game.

It’s become evident that some season ticket holders don’t go every week and some of them apparently have not been in the habit of making sure someone else takes the ticket when they won’t be going.

Perhaps the 52k was chosen on what they were pretty sure they could get for every fixture, as long as the ‘spare’ tickets get recycled accordingly.

Apparently there are still concerns about the playing surface. It was dug up due to it being too risky for causing injuries (he's some sort of specialist in this).

He'd been on site during the week and is still not happy with it.

I was puzzled why they would dig up and re-lay the brand new pitch (no doubt at great expense) after they did all the hi-tech stitching with those glorified knitting machines, then the mobile areas of illumination to get the grass to grow inside the dark bowl...

I assume from what you say he told you that the stitching job was somehow flawed? Which is a terrible indictment for presumably a highly professional and competent outfit who should have been on the job?

It seems a while since we heard of players getting their studs trapped in the twine they use to hold the turf together and badly twisting their knees, so I assumed that had solved that problem with the new turf technology.

Hmmm… I'm thinking this might be an interesting topic for an in-depth ToffeeWeb investigation and news report!!!

I have no idea if there is a problem with having to re-lay the pitch in such a short time, but I was puzzled as to why we hadn't built a retractable pitch. It's not as if they didn't have the room and it seemed it was always their intention to have concerts and other sporting events at the ground.

Also, being Americans, maybe they were also hoping to persuade one of the NFL teams to come and play a game or 2 here, which again would have been another reason for a retractable pitch.

Are you sure about that, Brian? The footprint was extremely cramped and I would contend there is literally no room on the current site for them to have incorporated a retractable pitch.

The subsequent talk of acquiring Nelson Dock immediately to the south of Bramley-Moore Dock, and filling that in with half-a-million cubic meters of precious sand from Liverpool Bay, could perhaps have provided the space needed.

But I wonder if, with the modern pitch technology, the retractable pitch is simply no longer necessary?

The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has a state-of-the-art hybrid pitch, but it also has a retractable system that divides the field into three sections and rolls it away beneath the South Stand to reveal an artificial NFL American football field.

I just assumed you had to keep the pitch in one piece!

They just reseeded the same one.

MK - 'I assume from what you say he told you that the stitching job was somehow flawed?'

The guy is some sort of risk analyst on the physics of sport. From what he said and as far as I understood it, in layman's terms, its to do with 2 things - the consistency level of the pitch and the underpinning foundation.

A lot of it was above my head, but he said the club think its fine, but he has concerns.

Many of us remember the days when the pitch would be relaid in the summer, see out a muddy winter, dry up in the spring and get relaid again the following summer.

Maybe a retractable roof could have been an idea, although not a necessity. It works at the Principality in Cardiff and various stadiums on the continent.

Capacity has been a discussion point. I'm not overly concerned and wasn't from the start. I'd rather see a fully packed stadium than empty seats. It doesn't lend towards atmosphere.

Would we have sold out 60,000 every home fixture? Possibly. 70,000? maybe. In the early days of the Emirates, Arsenal were declaring sell-outs of 60,000, when it was blatantly obvious there were empty seats all over the stadium. Tickets sold versus supporters actually in the ground.

It will be interesting with the ticket re-sellers and new holding company that has been set up to manage Ticketmaster. With over 40,000 season tickets sold (the maximum 80% of capacity permitted), taking off the away allocation and then corporate seats, I'm estimating that only leaves about 5,000 available for members before they even get to general sale.