NFL heading for London

London’s gearing up for the arrival of the regular season NFL with the game between the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants taking place at Wembley Stadium on 28 October. It’s a 90,000 sellout and if they had a bigger stadium they could have easily filled that, half a million people applied for tickets.

The New York Giants will be using Chelsea’s new training ground at Cobham as their base and have appointed John Terry and Didier Drogba as honorary team captains. Tom Coughlin, the Giants head coach, has been getting good reports about what his team can expect at Cobham from a Giants advance party. He said they told him ‘Coach, you are going to have a tear in your eye when you see the fields at Chelsea’s facility. You’ve only seen practice fields this beautiful in your dreams.’ Guess Abramovich has spent his money on something worthwhile after all.

As part of the build up to the game a giant animatronic replica of Dolphins player Jason Taylor will be unveiled in Trafalgar Square on Monday 22 October. It stands 26ft tall, has moveable feet and arms, travels at 4-5mph and a single footstep covers 2.5 metres. 150 sq.m of fabric was used to create the footbal shirt the replica wears and there is a special camera fitted to its helmet to transmit pictures of what it sees to a giant screen that travels behind it.

The Big JT will take part in a mystery tour of London leading up to the game before arriving at Wembley on the Sunday afternoon for the pre-game tailgate party the NFL is holding. Keep a look out for it if you’re around some of London’s major attractions next week.