Hallelujah to the news that MCC is to reject a plan to name Lord’s after a sponsor. Watching England play India in the ToffeeCrispStadium @Lord’s.org would have just felt wrong.

There is a certain poetry to the naming of cricket grounds. For more than a century, Test cricket has been played at Lord’s, Trent Bridge, Edgbaston and Old Trafford without the need to adorn the ground with a sponsor’s name.

Co-naming rights may have been signed for The Oval and Headingley - and how the addition of Brit and Carnegie grates - but nothing jarred quite as much as when the first Test of last summer’s Ashes series was staged at the SWALEC Stadium.

The problem was not that the match was played in Wales. It was that the ground used to have the far more attractive name of Sophia Gardens, until the South Wales electricity board bought a ten-year sponsorship deal in 2008 for £1.5 million. The only plus was the irony that it ambushed a series sponsored by npower, SWALEC’s competitor.

Yet the original name for the Cardiff ground was itself a form of sponsorship. Sophia Gardens was named after the wife of the second Marquess of Bute, who arranged for land in Cardiff to be put aside for sport in the late 1800s.

For that matter, what was the naming of Lord’s in 1787 but an early sponsorship deal? Thomas Lord was a Yorkshire wine merchant who had been approached by Lord Winchilsea, the patron of the Hambledon cricket club in Hampshire, to build a ground in London. Winchilsea said that Lord would be free to stick his own name on the ground as a reward.

Surely that was sponsorship. The only difference is that 200 years of tradition has given the name authenticity. Likewise, modern baseball fans could not imagine the Chicago Cubs playing at a ground named anything but Wrigley Field, although the stadium changed its name Read more…

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All eyes are on one man as the Ashes head for Edgbaston – but England cannot cling to belief that one man can slay the Australians alone

English cricket and their somewhat undernourished supporters have done plenty of lionising in their time but never before has one man carried the kind of burden Andrew Flintoff takes on to the field here today. Whatever the weight, though, he can hardly complain.

Some men smile sheepishly and shrug their shoulders when heroism is heaped upon them. “Freddie” tends to look as though he is auditioning for a remake of Gladiator.

The question is a big one, however. Can he really carry the freight? Can he do what he did so memorably four years ago, when his body was much less assailed, and wage the fight right up to the moment the Ashes are regained? Or will he lapse into the mode of 2006-07, when the highest expectations foundered amid some of the worst neglect of competitive responsibilities ever seen in a major sportsman?

That might sound like a mean appraisal of Flintoff’s situation after his spectacular performance at Lord’s but we can be sure it is one the Australians, however highly they rate the recent evidence of their most celebrated opponent’s match-winning potential, will be entertaining today. Read more…

Administrator Ashes, England Andrew Flintoff, Andrew Strauss, Ashes, Cardiff, Caribbean, Edgbaston, England, fitness, Freddie, Glenn McGrath, Ian Botham, IPL, Lord's, Michael Vaughan, Paul Collingwood, Phillip Hughes, Pietersen, Ricky Ponting, Sophia Gardens

Established: 1967
Capacity: 15,000
Floodlights: Yes
Ends: River Taff, Cathedral Road
Home Team: Glamorgan
No Test History

Overview

Sophia Gardens - now known by the suits by the rather less romantic moniker of the SWALEC Stadium - in Cardiff is perhaps the most controversial choice for a Test match venue in history.

Certainly it has provoked the greatest volume of discussion and debate. For some, the fact that it’s outside England is problem enough (these people, it seems, are unaware of Simon Jones); to those who don’t read the Daily Mail, it’s that most un-British of practices - queue-jumping - that causes unrest.

The anger in Durham and Hampshire was deep and understandable. Durham has patiently proved itself capable of hosting Test cricket over the past decade with a number of low-profile early-season matches, while the impressive Rose Bowl had good reason to believe they were next in line.

That Cardiff was awarded a Test match is - for sane people who know that Welsh cricket fans follow the England team - reasonably uncontroversial. The ground has been extensively and impressively redeveloped. It is ready for Test cricket. Read more…

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The cricket ground were ranked from one to five. Property Week has used the information to list every Ashes’ ground in order of the cricketers’ preference by percentage. Drivers Jonas also asked the players’ their thoughts on the controversial decision to have the opening test at Sophia Gardens.

1.) Lords – 89.4%

Unsurprisingly, ‘the home of cricket’ ranked highest in the Drivers Jonas poll. Thirty-one of the 45 cricketers said Lords was their first choice Ashes venue. A further nine said it was their second choice and the remaining five said it was their third choice. Lord’s is set for £400m of further improvements with the Marylebone Cricket Club currently working through plans for a major redevelopment of the ground. Last year Herzog & de Meuron, the architects behind the Bird’s Nest stadium at the 2008 Olympics, were appointed to draw up a masterplan for the redeveloped stadium.

2.) Edgbaston – 72.2%

Warwickshire’s Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham is also not resting on its laurels after achieving the second highest score. Plans for a £30m redevelopment were submitted at the end of last year. A 90,000 sq ft hotel, 150,000 sq ft of offices, 254 homes, 49,000 sq ft of Read more…

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