Lancashire install cash Point
The Point, sited next to the 1895 pavilion
England’s second much-more-of-a-Test-than-it-used-to-be against Bangladesh has also been the first look most of us have had at the new Old Trafford conference centre, The Point. The naming of the new building has made it easy for the press to poke fun at Lancashire – what’s the Point, missing the Point, Point of no return…I could go on but I won’t. Instead I’m going to ask, Pointedly, what do we make of it all?
Lancashire claim that The Point is “the cutting edge of hospitality”. If hospitality simply means a bunch of suits enjoying a day of drinking at a sporting event that they pay only partial attention to, and then not at all after 2pm, then I have to take issue with this.
But it doesn’t, it’s much more than just a huge box full of some smaller boxes for drinking alcohol in. Never before has a large red box at a cricket ground had it’s own website, it’s own twitter profile and a dedicated webcam publishing grainy images of it. I’ll leave you to insert your own Ryan Sidebottom joke here.
To save you the bother of actually reading the website to see what’s on offer, here’s a summary in the style of those sketches on Mock the Week where Hugh Dennis translates a speech:
- Moveable interior walls…for when the chaps from nPower get a bit too rowdy
- Large power supplies – 125Amp 3-phase available…those Blackberrys don’t charge themselves you know
- Over fifty hanging points…for extra lighting, but can also be used during stock-market crashes
- Electronic blackout blinds…Jonathan Trott just came in to bat
- Lift access for passengers…for those who can no longer walk unaided
- Green features including: rainwater harvesting…after 2pm the execs will be too far gone to notice the difference
- Two LCD projectors for projection onto end walls…exclusively reserved for Lalit Modi and county chief executives
All of this £12m tomfoolery comes at a cost to the aesthetic balance of Old Trafford. As the Manchester Evening News put it
A bright red wedge of contemporary architecture that stands in stark contrast to its surroundings.
Siting The Point right next to the grand old pavilion (1895) is Lancashire’s way of saying “stuff the history, show us the cash”. They are planning to complete the effect by building a second one on the other side.
Needless to say, reaction has been mixed. To find a true cross-section of opinion, I have been carrying out exhaustive research over an extended period (trans: I found some tweets by the England players). First, here’s @Swannyg66:
The new old Trafford stand is quite frankly worse than eating sprouts dipped in marmite. Washed down with turps.
And here’s @JimmyAnderson9:
Most of the talk in the dressing room today was of the new stand/box at old trafford. A big thumbs down from most of the lads but I like it!
who followed up with:
We have decided this morning that the reason swanny doesn’t like the new stand is because it is taking a lot of attention away from him.
I think it would look good in the right context, but until the rest of the ground is renovated in a similar modern style, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Footnotes
[1] – Cover image for this post sourced from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 3.0 license
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