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After forcing Accrington to install seats that may never be used, and leaving vast plains empty at Edgar Street, the people who write the ground grading regulations have sloping pitches in their sights.
Barnet chairman Tony Kleanthous, in the second part of his interview with their supporters association, says the most recent review of ground regulations wanted to increase minimum capacities and banish slopes from pitches: "As it stands now, we meet the League criteria. The problem is that as little as two years ago there was another Football League working party set up to look at ground criteria. Fortunately I managed to get on that working party.
"I found that there were only two things on the whole agenda: one was what the stadium entrance capacity should be - whether or not it should go back to being 6,000 - and the other was what the allowable slope on a pitch should be. We dealt with that issue, but we all know that eventually we'll be told enough is enough. You cannot carry on with a pitch like ours; the slope is just not acceptable. And then we have this problem that if you straighten the slope, you have to straighten all the stands too. We just don't have the room here."
Kleanthous also notes further changes to other parts of the regulations that will have to be complied with that will cost thousands to adhere to: "Just to give you an example of how difficult it is, each press box now has to have a writing station and an electricity point for each member of the press.
Most clubs would think 'Okay, it's a bit of work but we can deal with it'. But for us, having to provide each press person with their own electricity point means we won't have enough electricity on the site, so that's a major nightmare for me. We're having to work on rebalancing the power on the site because we actually don't have enough electricity coming into this site to run this ground. To fix that we'd have to buy a big transformer, but there's nowhere to put it and anyway they cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. So even the most minor things can cause a huge problem here.
"We even had times last year when we had to turn tea urns off in some of the tea huts because it was overloading the power. People don't realise some of the crazy things we live with. When the floodlights are on, we really struggle with power for anything else."
The full interview can be seen here.
