History
The Main Stand was designed by renowned football architect Archibald Leitch, whose company also built an ornate pavilion (similar to Craven Cottage) complete with clocktower. However, these were largely removed with the expansion of the ground.
The first match at Fratton Park was a friendly against local rivals Southampton, which was won 2–0, with goals from Dan Cunliffe (formerly with Liverpool) and Harold Clarke (formerly with Everton).
Fratton Park hosted a first-round football game in the 1948 Summer Olympics (one of only two grounds outside London, the other being the now disappeared Goldstone Ground). It hosted one full England international match on 2 March 1903 against Wales and has also hosted some England U-21 internationals. Pompey was the first club to stage a Football League match under floodlights, in a 22 February 1956 game against Newcastle United. New floodlight towers were constructed in 1962.
It has held 51,385 for an FA Cup match against Derby County in 1949. The capacity has in recent years been much reduced by the introduction of compulsory seating.
Read more about this topic: Fratton Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)