Wembley's Last Post.

"They think it's all over. It is now..."

It's official. They're pulling it down. To some the Twin Towers will always mean what the Yanks call Nine-Eleven, but to football fans another beloved set of twin towers is about to come crashing to the ground.

Today they finally sorted themselves out, and gave the go ahead for a new National Sports Stadium to be built in place of the existing stadium at Wembley. And this means leveling the whole place.

They say the wrecking ball could be moving in tomorrow morning. Some thick skinned individual will turn up for a days work and spend a few days methodically reducing to rubble two of the most iconic structures in the country and get paid for it.

I suppose that Royal executioners had the same kind of 'jobsworth' nonchalance - How else could you casually lop the head off Mary Queen of Scots, or Charles I. Some bugger went home for his tea after committing regicide, patted the kids on the head and heard the missus ask "Good day at the scaffold then?".

I know I know - it's just some creaky old southern barn we were forced to play our cup finals in, and stood in a Godfersaken screamingly dull area of North London that was mercifully within minutes of the M1 and the trek back North. Or a million miles from a tube station, depending on how drunk you were when you left the place - Wembley's a great neck of the woods for getting hopelessly lost in the small hours after Prince or Madonna gigs. You know you've had a good time when you end up at Hendon at 5am munching bagels...

Our lass has already getting at me for going on about some crappy southern shed when there were others up north that got pulled down just as ruthlessly. "Quarry Hill Flats could have been done up and turned into a great big love hotel..." she says. Or something.

Aye, but there was none of the sheer drama that the twin towers of Wembley evoked. The 66 Final. The Matthews Final. Sheffield Wednesday vs Sheffield United. The Live Aid Concert. Springsteen. Gazza. Euro '96. The 2000 Barnsley Playoff, the last competitive club game played on the sacred Wembley turf. I'm sorry, but throughout my life a trip to Wembley Stadium has had a tad more depth of meaning than a trip to Quarry Hill. Love hotel or no love hotel.

I've spent many a happy hour in the shadows of those towers. In spite of the sad crap the owners frequently pulled, like charging £40 to get a ten year old child into a virtually empty England Portugal game because the family enclosure was full.. Or the insanely high price of a bottle of water or a glass of pop. Or the badly made and ill-researched event programmes that cost more than the ticket. And virtually all the mean-spirited corporate shite that squeezed the living daylights outof most events there during the nineties - epitomised by the memory of Queen's hideous "We Are The Champions" drowning out genuine post match celebrations. Even on dog nights.

Now and again I found myself actually inside those towers and on those occasions I was always struck by the weird unreality of it. The great twin towers of Wembley Stadium are in fact two badly stuck together concrete jelly moulds - a travesty of the beautifully crafted eastern stupas that influenced their design. From inside you could see that they were chucked together as temporary exhibition structures, and marvel that they hadn't come crashing down onto the Royal Box long ago.

Some are campaigning for their survival even now, and they are already assured a place in the long list of London landmarks proudly bulldozed in the name of progress.

Those crackpot ideas, like taking it lump by lump to some park in Cleckheaton or somewhere, were doomed from day one. Their visual splendour has always been a happy accident as the towers never stood up to scrutiny. The reality is that the poor old towers just don't live up to their huge reputation. The sheer crappiness of the things is something I've tried not to think about - the glory of playing beneath them was somehow tainted in the knowledge of their fragility.

Football thrives on mythology. It is hard to accept that something that symbolises hopes and aspirations of millions can and will crumble so easily. It's almost as if those achievements were illusory too. As devotees to the glory of the game, us football fans hate to see the past dissolve. Those memories are precious.

But the old fields of dreams are gradually disappearing. Ayresome Park and Roker Park are long gone. Down in London even a Grade One Conservation status isn't going to save Highbury. And the latest addition to the list is Elland Road, Leeds.

In it's own quiet way, watching the dude in the digger go about his demolition work will be a painful experience. I'm not sure I want to see it happen. I just hope the feller doing the honours has a lump in his throat as he removes one of sports most beloved symbols forever, and reduces our dreams to a pile of dust. Just get the damn thing rebuilt pronto, OK? Blogga.