India Play England at Old Trafford - Manchester - Cotonopolis

What you see here is the emblem of Cricket club – that has rich history behind ….. the ‘Red Rose of Lancaster’  is the county flower of Lancaster and used in the county's a heraldic badge and flag.  The rose was first adopted as an heraldic device by the first Earl of Lancaster and became the emblem of Lancashire following the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.  The Wars of the Roses were a series of dynastic wars for the throne of England. They were fought between supporters of two rival branches of the royal House of Plantagenet, the houses of Lancaster and York. Getting back to Cricket, Lancashire County Cricket Club was founded  in 1864 as a successor to Manchester Cricket Club, Lancashire have played at Old Trafford since then and, in 1865, played their inaugural first-class match, beating Middlesex at Old Trafford. Cyril Washbrook became Lancashire’s first professional captain in 1954.  Our own Farokh Engineer, the flamboyant keeper and opener played alongside Clive Lloyd between 1968-76.  Years later, the left-arm spinner Murali Karthik too played for this club.  The immediate reference of modern times of this place would of course be – ‘Manchester United Football Club’ the professional football club, based in Old Trafford, Greater Manchester; founded in 1878 as Newton Heath LYR Football Club and changed name to Manchester United in 1902. Manchester United have won the most League titles (20) of any English club, a joint record 11 FA Cups, four League Cups, and a record twenty FA Community Shields. The 1958 Munich air disaster claimed the lives of eight players. In 1968, under the management of Matt Busby, Manchester United was the first English football club to win the European Cup. Alex Ferguson won 28 major honours, and 38 in total, from November 1986 to May 2013.  Recently,  Louis van Gaal was appointed as the club's new manager after Ferguson's successor David Moyes was sacked after only 10 months in charge.  Manchester United is the third-richest football club; in Augt 2012, Manchester United made an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Even though he was ruled out of Real Madrid’s friendly matchup against Manchester United Saturday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, superstar Cristiano Ronaldo still found a way to affect the match by hinting he would be open for another stay at Old Trafford. Five years ago Los Blancos acquired Ronaldo from United for a then-record £80 million fee, but Ronaldo has said he still holds a “passion” and “love” for his old club, according to The Telegraph. Well, as my friends know, this is a post on Cricket – on the forthcoming 4^th Test to be played at Old Trafford -  known for sponsorship reasons as Emirates Old Trafford.  It opened in 1857 as the home of Manchester Cricket Club and has been the home of Lancashire County Cricket Club since 1864. Old Trafford is England's second oldest test venue and one of the most renowned.  It was the venue for the first ever Ashes test to be held in England in July 1884 and has hosted two Cricket World Cup semi-finals. In 1956, the first 10-wicket haul in a single innings was achieved by England bowler Jim Laker who achieved bowling figures of 19 wickets for 90 run.  It was here in the 1983 Semis, England were tied by the bowling of Kirti Azad and Mohinder whose 24 overs cost only 55 runs.  It was at Manchester in 1982 that Sandeep Patil famously moved from 80 to 104 in a single over of Bob Willis (6 fours struck in that 7 ball over !) The ground is in the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester situate in North West England, comprising ten metropolitan boroughs that include the cities of Manchester and Salford. It is landlocked and borders Cheshire; Derbyshire; Yorkshire and Merseyside.   This place attracted industrialisation in the 19th century when the region flourished as the global center of the cotton industry. The recorded history of Manchester began with the civilian settlement associated with the Roman fort of Mamucium.  Manchester's unplanned urbanisation was brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution; the building of the Bridgewater Canal in 1761 built to transport coal triggered an early-19th-century factory building boom which transformed Manchester from a township into a major mill town.  spinning mills of Manchester... pic credit : www.sciencemuseum.org.uk Manchester's fortunes decreased after the Second World War; however investment spurred by the 1996 Manchester bombing led to extensive regeneration, particularly in the city center. Manchester was the site of the world's first railway station and is where scientists first split the atom, and developed the first stored-program computer. Manchester is also regarded as the birthplace of Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, and both capitalism and communism.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began to write the Communist Manifesto at Chetham Library, the oldest public library in the English-speaking world. Cottonopolis denotes a metropolis centred on cotton trading servicing the cotton mills in its hinterland. It was inspired by Manchester which has become a sobriquet applied solely to the city of Manchester. Have read that Matka gambling flourished in India – a wager  on random numbers and that was on closing /opening prices of wholesale cotton traded on Bombay Cotton Exchange……   With regards – S. Sampathkumar
5^th Aug 2014.