The Albert Ground is a sporting oasis, nestled between St Kilda Road and Queens Road, only minutes from Melbourne’s CBD.  The ground is home to cricket and lacrosse teams from the Melbourne Cricket Club. Scoreboard Pressure’s previous visit was back in March 2012.

In September 2018 the ground’s heritage-listed scoreboard was given a facelift. It’s an example of modern technology creating a heritage look. Cricket fans, and scoreboard aficionados, may have seen something similar during the Perth Test last summer when the scoreboard in the city’s new stadium occasionally looked like the old WACA scoreboard.

Thanks to Solid Display Systems for the photos and information about the upgrade of the Albert Cricket Ground. Scoreboard Pressure welcomes contributions from other signage companies/scoreboard manufacturers regarding innovative scoreboards, old scoreboards, new scoreboards….

 

• Day 1 7.30am
  • Always great to start a job but at this point about 90% of work is done. Planning, engineering, meetings, permits, fabrication… etc.
  • The board had already been stripped by the club for memorabilia.

• Day 1 dismantle
  • The old steel work didn’t look like much but it was crazy thick and weighed heaps.
  • The fascia steel was supporting the roof. By this stage we had already installed a new supporting post in the middle.
• Steel
  • The old scoreboard was nowhere near strong enough to support the new screen
  • Behind the screens there are new roof supports and a full length steel lintel. The front bricks are now doing nothing!

• 

• Day 1  End
  • Going as planned. Our pre-fab sub-frame is installed ready for the LED

• Day 2  10am
  • The LED screen is installed. Then we do the wiring and testing.

• Summary layout. This a typical layout for general display 90% of the time.

• Rolling layout
  • Even though this is a decent sized scoreboard you would not be able to display a full batting list at a readable letter height.
  • We developed this neat little rolling effect to cater for this issue.
  • Sometimes we set the system to play this full list (and bowling list) after every over, then revert back to Summary.
  • Even if you have a scoreboard a quarter of the size, you will be able to view a full list.

 

 

• Heritage Layout
  • This solution is not new to Solid Display Systems but it suited the Albert Ground as the MCC had planning concerns about changing the historic structure.
  • We had no idea that this would become the go-to layout for most games!
  • We took a clean photo of the old scoreboard, including the tilted Extras window, and programmed our data to suit.
  • For this heritage look we can also program the numbers to “roll”, as if there still old bike chains inside the scoreboard.
• Notes.
  • This screen IS a full colour screen. The MCC wanted to keep it simple.
  • Multiple layouts can be set up to suit. A club can have as many different layouts as they want (one Sydney premier club has over 20 layouts).

 

Scoreboard Pressure welcomes contributions from other signage companies/scoreboard manufacturers regarding innovative scoreboards, old scoreboards, new scoreboards….