Jos Buttler’s second six flew straight past the television cameras on their temporary gantry, high over the building works and into the rugby ground beyond. It was a thing of beauty, even if the barren concrete of the empty half‑built stand added a sprinkling of 21st‑century bathos.
The clank of hammer on a half-cooked redevelopment has become common as cricket grounds compete to upgrade and refit; earn and hold on to their Test status. The haphazard enlargement of Headingley over the years has made her an unprepossessing but good-natured old girl. She is a little careworn about the edges, with a bit of extra heft here and there, but there is a twinkle in her eye and a sharpness to her very expensive new shoes.
Much has changed since the crowds poured in to watch the first Test here in 1899, when Jack Hearne got a hat-trick against Australia and rain forced a draw.
A carcass of steel forms the skeleton of what will be the new Emerald stand, squeezed between the Headingley pavilion and the White Rose stand, the Western Terrace as once was. From the numbered blue bucket seats at the end of the White Rose, where the smell of frying from the Sausage Shack swoops up to tempt the hungry or the hungover, the guts of the new development are clear. Red and yellow rigs of scaffolding, a looping, cursive roof, a hamlet of tents, rubble and skips, stand shameless behind barriers.
The building work that started as last season drew to a close will continue until May 2019, in time for the Ashes Test and the World Cup. As the adjacent rugby ground is rebuilding at the same time, constructors have had to use all their powers of trickery to nurdle huge machines through one little gate and between two very valuable bits of grass.
The new stand will seat 4,300, making the total capacity of Headingley 18,350 – valuable extra bodies. The rugby and cricket grounds will share conference and banqueting suites, and from 2019 will combine catering and bar facilities. All of which will help combat the high-stakes financial mess Yorkshire found themsleves in, muddled further by the ground’s areas of shared ownership.
David Warner, sage of the Yorkshire press box, remembers a time when the ground was lower, greener, and a little more rough around the edges – when men “turned the tins” in the famous old scoreboard at the Kirkstall Lane end, and there was a bowling green where marquees were put up for refreshments at big matches.
“Until the start of the 1980s there was what was known as the Coconut Shy at the Kirkstall Lane end,” he says. “You could just see heads poking above the white background which acted as a sightscreen. Behind it was a long row of Canadian Spruce trees which enclosed the ground and made the ball swing.”
But though lines of terraced red roofs still cascade upwards and away behind the North-East stand, the trees are long gone. There is no space for sentiment as Test cricket marches away from grounds and towards arenas.
Lord’s remains a place of architectural beauty, despite the building of the past few years – most recently the new, very green, Warner stand. Last autumn, the members at last agreed on a new £194m redevelopment which will not be completed till 2032. Trent Bridge, too, remains lovely, though the building of the Fox Road stand and the New Stand led to a peculiar microclimate that encourages the ball to swing.
Old Trafford, which lost its place on the Test rota temporarily, has been transformed since thousands queued overnight to snaffle tickets for the final day of the 2005 Ashes game. The square has been reorientated to north-south, silencing forever the many harebrained schemes put forward to combat the brightness of the setting sun. The pavilion has been rebuilt and is now flanked by two huge red pillar boxes – the Point and the Players and Media Centre. A new Hilton hotel has replaced the faithful Old Trafford Lodge; many still miss the club’s hanging baskets.
The Oval grows ever bigger, ever more unabashed, and the proposed redevelopment of the Lock and Laker stand and an extension to the Mickey Stewart Members’ pavilion will take capacity to 28,000, while a big bullring-style pavilion has replaced the old one at Edgbaston.
And so cricket is played at bigger, bolder, if bleaker venues. But building site or not, England’s first Test win since September 2017 happened at Headingley, a victory built out of the rubble of Lord’s.
