tz
/ August 17, 2026
Dragon Challenge was a pair of dueling inverted roller coasters at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida, built by Swiss manufacturer Bolliger & Mabillard. The ride opened on May 28, 1999, as Dueling Dragons, with its two side-by-side tracks nicknamed Fire and Ice designed
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tz
/ August 17, 2026
Drachen Fire was a steel looping roller coaster that opened April 4, 1992, at Busch Gardens Williamsburg in Virginia. Designed by legendary Arrow Dynamics engineer Ron Toomer, the ride was themed around a fire-breathing dragon guarding its mountain lair, weaving riders through a rocky, forested
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Mansfield Town play in the fourth tier of English football in front of crowds that rarely trouble five figures. Their ground, though, holds a title no Premier League stadium can touch: Field Mill is the oldest ground in the Football League. Football has been played
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Sheffield United fans will tell you, at length and with justification, that their ground is the oldest in world football. They are right. Bramall Lane opened on 30 April 1855 as a cricket ground, started hosting football in the 1860s, and has never stopped —
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Every sport has its quirks, but only one first-class cricket ground ever asked fielders to work around a full-grown tree. For more than 150 years a lime stood inside the boundary at the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury, and Kent County Cricket Club wrote a
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Before it was a cricket ground, the site in Kennington was a market garden growing cabbages on land leased from the Duchy of Cornwall. Surrey County Cricket Club took the lease in 1845, laid roughly 10,000 turves shipped in from Tooting Common, and created a
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Grace Road is not named after W. G. Grace. The road took its name from Grace Margaret Yearby, daughter of a local property owner, Edward John Yearby — a coincidence so neat that the cricketing explanation has stuck for well over a century. What is
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Trent Bridge exists because a publican’s husband fenced off the field behind the pub. William Clarke married the proprietress of the Trent Bridge Inn, captained his own All-England Eleven, and in 1841 opened the ground on the land at the back. It has been the
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Professional rugby union and English league football almost never share a pitch. Rodney Parade does both. The ground on the east bank of the River Usk in Newport is home to Dragons RFC, one of Wales’ four regional rugby sides, and to Newport County, who
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Lord’s calls itself the Home of Cricket and, unusually for a sporting slogan, the claim is defensible. The ground has stood on its St John’s Wood site since 1814, it is owned by the Marylebone Cricket Club that wrote the Laws of the game, and
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Deepdale began as a farm. On 21 January 1875 the town’s North End sports club leased the land, which was then used for cricket and rugby, and it was not until 5 October 1878 that the ground staged its first association football match. Preston North
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
North Sydney Oval has been in use since 1867, and it is the rare 19th-century ground that has become busier rather than quieter. On any given year it stages Sheffield Shield cricket, Big Bash fixtures, AFL Women’s matches, Shute Shield rugby union and NSW Cup
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Most stadiums claim to be historic. The Racecourse Ground in Wrexham holds a record no other venue can take: it is the oldest international football stadium in the world that still hosts internationals. Wales played their first home international here in 1877 and are still
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
On 31 August 1968, Garry Sobers walked out at St Helen’s as captain of Nottinghamshire, faced an over from Glamorgan’s Malcolm Nash, and hit every ball for six. It was the first time anyone had scored the maximum 36 runs from a single over in
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
The County Ground in Derby was not built as a standalone cricket venue. It was laid out inside the loop of Derby Racecourse in 1863, and for the next 76 years horses ran around a cricket ground that sat in the middle of the track.
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Halfway up a hill in Crosspool, on the western edge of Sheffield, is a sloping grass pitch with a shed behind one goal and a cricket square next door. There is no bowl, no tier, no roof over most of it. There is, however, a
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
North Marine Road is a cricket ground hemmed in on two sides by the back walls of Victorian seaside guesthouses, five minutes’ walk from the North Sea. It opened in 1863, Yorkshire County Cricket Club has played County Championship matches here since 1896, and every
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Sussex County Cricket Club did not so much build a new ground in 1872 as move the old one. The club had played at the Royal Brunswick Ground, on the seafront, and when a barley field off Eaton Road was bought in 1871 the turf
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Old Trafford Cricket Ground opened in 1857 and has been the home of Lancashire County Cricket Club since 1864. It is England’s second-oldest Test venue after The Oval, and it holds a record no other ground in the world can touch: 17 Cricket World Cup
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tz
/ August 16, 2026
Most stadiums that spend half a billion dollars on a rebuild throw out the old scoreboard. Adelaide Oval kept its. The hand-operated board on the northern mound, designed by architect F. Kenneth Milne and first used in 1911, still posts the score in letters and
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