Old Trafford, Manchester

No, not that Old Trafford in Manchester. Good grief.

Anyway. This is a ground I’ve visited five times, three times for the cricket, and twice for music (the first of these was a fairly depressing experience which saw Oasis headline. My abiding memory is of plastic pint glasses full of urine being thrown around, which says it all. The second of these was much, much better).

As for the cricket, two of the three days were back-to-back during the Ashes series of 2005. On the first day me and my companion saw Ashley Giles’ ‘ball of the century’ and were inadvertently included in a promo for Channel 4’s coverage of the series, while on the second it rained most of the day: having bumped unexpectedly into a couple of other friends we spent most of the dry drinking expensive lager under dripping stands, later getting a part-refund on our tickets. And what, indeed, speaks of an English cricketing summer more than that eh?