Cardiff's faithful invest fervent hope in Hammam's vision

Second division: Atmosphere reaches fever pitch in host city with expectation of local success while QPR pin revival hopes on team spirit

Perhaps only in Cardiff, that most indignant of capital cities, could they spend all week focusing not on the 90 minutes that may just represent the most important in their football club's history but on the few inconsequential minutes that precede them.

Will they play the Welsh national anthem, won't they play the Welsh national anthem? The debate has raged with such ferocity that an outsider could be excused for thinking he had stumbled on the Eurovision Song Contest and not the Second Division play-off final. The outcry was heard all the way to the Commons, where a motion was tabled protesting about the Football League's decision to play only God Save The Queen before tomorrow's showdown with Queen's Park Rangers.

Eventually, the League came to its compromise - just club songs will be played before all three of this weekend's finals - but only after Rhodri Morgan, the Welsh Assembly's First Minister, had spoken for everybody bemused by such an irrelevance in saying: "Why are they playing any anthems? It's only a game to decide who comes third in the Second Division, after all."

But wise as these words may have been, they invoked something that has been in rare supply ever since Cardiff beat Bristol City in the play-off semi-final 11 days ago - perspective. The atmosphere that has been generated by Cardiff's first appearance in their own city's glittering citadel has reached such a frenzy that tickets have reportedly been harder to get hold of than they were for last Saturday's FA Cup final.

Indeed, the only thing that will have the touts hesitating before making a killing outside the Millennium Stadium has been a warning from a notorious bunch of Cardiff hooligans that they shall be dishing out their own brand of punishment should they come across any such opportunism. "Face value" may well take on an all too literal meaning in the minds of any touts brave enough to make the trip.

So what has made feelings run so high in a capital that has always been synonymous with the egg-shaped ball but now appears to have been bitten by the spherical bug? To leave aside the myth that says Cardiff is a rugby city, when almost every pitch you see within its confines has posts no higher than 8ft, and the fact that the national side is on the crest of a wave, promising to take Wales all the way to Euro 2004, the answer must be Sam Hammam. The Lebanese chairman has a vision for Cardiff City that slowly, but very surely, the locals have bought into, even though his legions of critics will insist that a Hammam vision always has a huge pound sign as its backdrop.

In his three years in charge, he has made a £7.5m investment. For a club used to having purse strings so tight they would twang in a strong wind, to see big-money purchases such as Graham Kavanagh and Peter Thorne walk into Ninian Park gladdened Cardiff hearts. The home-grown heroes Hammam has kept also helped his popularity soar. Robert Earnshaw and Daniel Gabbidon are two Welsh internationals who would have been sold like a shot in days only recently gone by. The city began to sit up and get curious, and within a year of Hammam's arrival the gates had nigh on doubled.

Then came Leeds and the 2-1 victory in the FA Cup last January that gave the Bluebirds their day in the clouds. Admittedly, a pitch invasion, bottle-throwing and an inadvisable walk around the pitch by the club's unique chairman generated bad some press, but then Cardiff and their fans have been no strangers to bad press over the years. If anything the rumpus, which, in reality, resulted in just four arrests, merely served to make Cardiff knit even tighter and they wove one of those comfort blankets, known as a siege mentality, that they just love to cling on to whenever they perceive anyone as out to get them.

Then there is the stadium. Not the Millennium, 600 yards around the corner, but the one across the road from crumbling Ninian Park that will be built over the next two to three years. Planning approval has already been granted for a 30,000-capacity arena that will be enlarged to 60,000 should the Premiership ever come calling.

That would satisfy the fans, but what would have Hammam's accountants purring just as contentedly is the vast retail park that dominates the plans. Meanwhile, the old ground will be used for what it was always destined to be, a prime piece of commercial land for housing development.

What this grand vision hinges on, of course, is success on the pitch. Hammam has spent big and expects big, and Lennie Lawrence, the Cardiff manager, wears the expression of a man whose shoulders are creaking under the weight of it all.

"If you told me 18 months ago how much of a buzz this would have created, then I would have been staggered. But now it doesn't,' he said this week, "because this is a big club just waiting to happen and it needs First Division status, it really does. Not many Second Division finals have got a crowd of 73,000 - usually it's only around 40,000 - and that shows how big we could be."

Big enough to fill the Millennium Stadium twice over on their own if the 100,000 requests for tickets on a single morning over the internet last week and the eight-hour queues that stretched down Sloper Road are anything to go by. Perhaps this fervour is why Lawrence, who has managed at the top level with Charlton and Middlesbrough, was mindful of the need to add at least a dash of perspective when he rated it as no more than "the fourth or fifth biggest match I've been involved in".

It was a brave attempt at understatement that smacked of a manager desperate to avoid being carried away on "the big day out" euphoria that has swept Cardiff.

"The day will mean nothing, absolutely nothing if we don't win promotion," he said. "This is not a Cup final, it's much more important than that. Take Southampton last Saturday. They came here, did ever so well, had a nice day out - lovely. But at the end of it they hadn't lost anything. They were still in the Premiership, they were still in the Uefa Cup. We are playing for bigger stakes here, a much bigger prize."

A prize that would no doubt see Cardiff erupt into song. Anthem or no anthem.