Old Trafford

Took a couple of connecting buses from the hotel down to Old Trafford. We couldn't find any information on the internet about tours of the cricket ground, and sure enough there weren't any. They wouldn't even let us take a photo inside the ground as they are setting up for the Green Day concert at the ground tomorrow (and the fans are already queuing for spots), but the power of the zoom lens won out again and I got a couple of happy snaps.

Walked down the road a couple of minutes more to the Manchester United ground, and it was a completely different story. Please come in. Please take a tour. Please spend your money, and that I did. A really good tour of the ground, pitch, stadium, benches, player's lounge, player's dressing room, tunnel, Munich disaster memorial, and museum which lasted almost two hours. Not surprisingly, the tour finished in the mega-store (anybody for a US$80,000 print?). Counted over 100 cash registers, so I guess it's pretty busy on game day. Seating capacity is about 76,000, and when you discard seating for the WAGs, there are almost 50,000 seats available for 100,000 members each game day, so even fully paid members have to apply to go in a ballot for each game they want to attend.

The museum was very good, and certainly very large as there is a fair bit of silverware to display. It's a huge business running the club with an annual turnover of around 173 million pounds, roughly a quarter of a billion US dollars, which is the largest sporting franchise in the world, bigger than that of the New York Yankees.

Took the tram into the city and spent the afternoon walking around the city. Saw the gothic Town Hall, giant ferris wheel, museums, and all the usual buildings that you'd expect. What we didn't expect, however, was the appalling fashion in the city. Now I'm not exactly a Gucci clotheshorse, but half the city seems to have thrown on the first thing they could put their hands on in their darkened bedrooms this morning. People in Berlin or Paris or Venice would die before they wore that kind of stuff. Regardless of the fashion, however, the city is really nice, and a lot of money seems to have been spent on modernising and improving it.