We are in France on a family holiday while the Ashes’ Test at Headingley is showing the world the Carnegie Pavilion. This matters to me because that pavilion was my idea for Leeds Metropolitan University in partnership with Yorkshire CCC’s Stewart Regan, Robin Smith & Colin Graves, and Leeds Rugby’s Paul Caddick and Gary Hetherington. The chair of the planning committee said that Will Alsop’s design was like a space ship descending on Headingley’s Victorian terraced houses but still gave permission.

That was a £20million investment to provide an extra campus space for students for most of the year and to help preserve Test cricket at Headingley. Previously, we had built the new Carnegie grandstand with the rugby club and they have subsequently completed their stadium with the new South Stand and now the one between the rugby and cricket grounds. I last saw a cricket match there three years ago when England played Sri Lanka (photo above).

Meanwhile, my modest suggestion of decent changing rooms for the future of mixed village cricket is struggling for acceptance at Middleton Stoney Cricket Club. This only goes to show that the ‘Up to you, skip’ formula does not apply to off-the-field matters, quite understandably.  Not that I am proposing anything as radical as the Alsop design for the Carnegie Pavilion, which has echoes of his (unbuilt) Fourth Grace idea for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture Year.

In 2003, I gave my inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Beyond Boundaries’, for Leeds Met in the Long Room at Headingley cricket ground. One of the points I made was that in partnerships such as those between Botham and Dilley or Botham and Old in the famous 1981 Test there, a partner often has to make a contribution beyond their specialism. It’s not the physical transformation of the ground which is the whole story of Headingley but the way in which cricket and rugby combined on the sporting front and how they pioneered an educational partnership with a neighbouring university. No matter how beautiful or historic your ground, you need to keep improving facilities. No matter how good their cricket is, clubs from village level to those which host Test cricket also need to partner others in serving the wider community.  This Test match promises to be a great spectacle tomorrow but it is worth looking beyond boundaries to appreciate how Headingley has changed the landscape of sport and education.