Headingly Cricket Ground

We begin the day in a huge sports hall (which was very expensive according to our coach) where we played a series of cricket skills games, before playing a final session of non-stop cricket.





After our cricket practice, we crossed the street to the main cricket ground and were taken up to the VIP area (!) where we got a wonderful view of the ground. Here we were given a lecture about the history of the Yorkshire County Cricket Club which we were told we would be tested on later.

Before the main quiz, people who answered questions correctly were awarded a massive cricket shirt to wear for the rest of the session. They were so big you could even curtsy with them as shown above!

All prepared to have a leather cricket ball hurtled towards you at almost 100 mph?!



Ah... that's more like it! After being shown the cricket safety wear, we had our quiz which involved cool interactive hand-held gismos. There are no photographs of this though as staff were also invited to take part in the quiz and every second counted - sorry!



We were lucky enough to see a machine which fires cricket balls at around 95 mph, just like the best bowlers in the world currently. The machine could be adjusted to affect speed, bounce and so on, enabling varied batting practice.

Finally we got to go inside the Carnegie Pavillion (which we learned cost 23 million pounds to build) where we were fortunate enough to go into the incredible room for journalists which also doubles as a lecture hall for Leeds Metropolitan University.

After that there was just time to check out the away team's changing room, which we were told was vastly inferior to the home team's in order to give a psychological edge over the opponent.

It was a fascinating day out, full of variety and the behaviour of all of the pupils was nothing short of excellent all day. Well done Class 4!