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Karren Brady has copped an enormous amount of flak in recent years from West Ham supporters, especially since the club signed a contract to move to Stratford in 2013 and pitched up in E20 in 2015.

The Hammers vice-chairman is loathed by some and mostly tolerated by others as the board of the club has come under fire, especially before and in the aftermath of those crowd disturbances during the defeat to Burnley back in March of this year.

"Tell her she's ruined the club" was one response to this writer when posting that football.london were at a meeting at the London Assembly where Brady was attending.

The snappily named London Assembly Budget Monitoring Sub-Committee meeting took place in Tower Bridge on Wednesday afternoon and Brady was there a good 20 minutes before the start, with a whole binder full of notes ready and waiting for her to explain West Ham's position in their number of disputes with the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), stadium owners E20 and stadium operators LS185.

As it transpired, those three parties got an absolute pasting through the hour and a bit that Brady was supposedly going be grilled during and it wasn't Brady doing it, it was the GLA committee.

"Shocking mistakes" was how one assembly member summed up how LLDC had said that hosting a match at the London Stadium set the taxpayer back £250,000 a pop. The latest revision from the quango now stands at £43,000 a match, which is less than it cost to do likewise at Upton Park (£51,000).

(Image: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty)

Another member said the figures were "wildly off" and added that the stadium's finances had to be "thoroughly interrogated."

If you expected Brady to bite on those remarks and tee off about those who are in charge of the stadium, then you'd be wrong. The vice-chairman was calm and measured in her response, not that she didn't give the occasional dig here and there, but she was full of praise for new LLDC chief executive Lyn Garner, who has at least tried to work with the club.

Brady was right too when she said that without West Ham, there would be no London Stadium. The cost of moving the retractable seating at the arena went from an original £300,000 per summer to an absolutely staggering £8m, now it's £2m. Is it any surprise the stadium owners lost a massive £22m last year?

Brady revealed she had tried "around 15 times" to engage in dialogue to try and help but had either no response or it was snubbed. Like her or loathe her, Brady is sticking up for the club at every turn in their number of disputes with their landlords.

She is there for her business acumen of course, and when you watch her taking on meetings like this, you realise that she really does know what she is talking about, as the Baroness should, but she really does.

There was a prime example of her sticking up for the club than when she explained how portraying West Ham's £2.5m-a-year rent as being too low is not the cause of the problem, it's LLDC's and E20's erratic attitude towards spending. The arena is often classed as the "Taxpayers Stadium" and the Hammers are somehow the reason why it has cost upwards of £757m in cash since it's inception.

Wrong.

(Image: Stephen Pond/Getty Images)

"You can see why this operation is under pressure. It is certainly not because of West Ham’s rent being low. It is because the costs are too high," the Baroness said.

West Ham have won every single court case, injunction and expert determination between them and the stadium parties since the Concession Agreement was signed between the two sides that agreed West Ham would move to Stratford. There is another court case coming up on November 19 over the capacity issue, and you'd expect the Hammers to win that too and have 60,000 fans at the ground every home game.

Brady was asked before the meeting was concluded if she had anything to add and this is what she said: "When we decided to move here in 2013 it represented a unique opportunity for us to grow our fanbase, profile, brand values and encourage more of that great things we are seeing on the pitch, we have spent £100m on new players this summer. We have a fantastic new manager.

"There are other reasons for us moving and a lot of that is to do with the legacy and community. I think a lot of people don't realise what West Ham's contribution is to the local area.

"We have invested £12.8m in the Newham borough and the Olympic boroughs and created over 2,000 jobs. We have given 390 young people and employment pathway, 1300 young people participating in our Kick It Out programme too.

"We are the only people in the area who are delivering athletics coaching in terms of the legacy, 2,000 people accessed that last year. We are getting more and more people from various different backgrounds involved in football.

"We have got 253 wheelchair spaces, the highest ratio in the Premier League, a disabled supporters advisory board that really helps us continue to improve that.

(Image: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

"Yes we have the stadium, yes we are proud to be there but we are also delivering all of these wonderful opportunities, all of this legacy, all of these jobs, all of this regeneration and I don't think that should be ignored.

It really shouldn't be ignored. It's far too easy to take things on face value - that West Ham are a burden, that Brady is "ruining the club" according to some, that all of the London Stadium's problems are down to West Ham.

Look a little bit deeper and your opinion might change. But that's up to you.

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