Stadium
Dover Athletic's home ground since the club's foundation has been the Crabble Athletic Ground, which was also the home of the former Dover club. The word Crabble, which is also found in the name of a local corn mill, may derive from the Old English crabba hol, meaning a hole in which crabs are found. The stadium, commonly known simply as "Crabble" or, imprecisely, as "The Crabble", forms part of a larger council-owned complex, and the earlier Dover club originally shared the lower pitch with a rugby club, but moved to the upper pitch in the 1950s, adding a grandstand in 1951, followed soon after by terracing and floodlights.
Dover Athletic continued to make improvements to the ground, although not in time to allow the club to take its place in the Football Conference in 1990. Subsequently new turnstiles were installed and two new terraces and a second grandstand added. These improvements meant that the club was able to gain promotion after its second Southern League title in 1993. The stadium's modern capacity is 6,500, with 1,000 seats and 4,900 spectators under cover.
In 2007 the club announced that under the new sponsorship deal with SeaFrance the stadium would be known officially as the SeaFrance Crabble Stadium, but a year later it was announced that the deal would not be renewed due to the ferry operator's financial constraints. On 1 July 2008 local car dealership Perry's was announced as the club's new main sponsor and the stadium rebranded as the Perry's Crabble Stadium, an arrangement which lasted until 2012. Between 2003 and 2004 it was known as the Hoverspeed Stadium under the terms of another such agreement. Margate played their home matches at Crabble for two seasons from 2002 until 2004, while their own Hartsdown Park ground was being redeveloped.
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Famous quotes containing the word stadium:
“It’s no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the Yankee Stadium of ancient times.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)
“The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“In their eyes I have seen
the pin men of madness in marathon trim
race round the track of the stadium pupil.”
—Patricia K. Page (b. 1916)