Looks new, still feels Old Trafford
A redeveloped Old Trafford, clad in the Lancashire red, made its presence felt after an eight-year hiatus from Test cricket without trading in its traditional feel writes Barney Ronay in the Guardian
02-Aug-2013
Manchester ended an eight-year break up with Ashes cricket for the third Test in 2013. Local boy James Anderson felt strange mentioning 'Old Trafford' and 'state-of-the-art' in the same sentence, but that is what the stadium has become after spending the last three years under redevelopment. Clad in the Lancashire red, an almost brand new Old Trafford made its presence felt without trading in its traditional feel writes Barney Ronay in the Guardian
Old Trafford has never been a bijou secret garden like Lord's or a city bolt hole like The Oval. It is instead a low-slung mix-and-match urban bowl, a ground that still allows the surrounding streets to peer in through the cracks. And for all the vague sense of tiered segregation and the hefty queues for bars and seats and ice cream vans - plus a fair helping of the claustrophobia common to all English Test grounds - this rebuilt arena still provided a heartening sense of that familiar Old Trafford spirit around its network of tunnels and byways, still awash with bars and pumps and pint glasses.
Michael Clarke tackled an unfamiliar batting position, reset Australia's floundering campaign and stood up to his own words - finding a way to get through the tough periods - during an innings that began uncertainly but became anything but. Simon Hughes in the Telegraph picks out the ease with which he nullified the Graeme Swann threat.
Slowly he remembered his steps: the stride back on to his stumps to play the turning delivery late, the shimmy up the pitch to caress, rather than crunch, the ball through extra cover against the spin. As his muscle-memory rebooted, his footwork became silky and his timing sublime. His range of movement - right back or two yards down the pitch - upset Swann's rhythm and forced him to try round the wicket. Clarke bunted him back over his head, the field scattered and Swann went back over the wicket. Now Clarke had control and the runs began to flow.
Michael Vaughan, in his column for the same paper states his distrust of Hot Spot and offers a few improvements to the present application of DRS
Hot Spot is frustrating everyone at the moment. I am not sure how reliable it is. We all want to feel we are moving closer to getting more decisions right but this week the inventor of Hot Spot admitted it misses a few edges. That cannot be right. Perhaps we can use it in combination with the Snicko to make the system more accurate. Overall I believe DRS is good for the game. It has moved cricket forward and we are getting more right decisions now. But we have to make sure the people who operate the system know the job.