The Ashes 2013-14: Keith Bradshaw, the former lord of Lord's is now Adelaide's master rebuilder Bradshaw explained how the stadium would then be used. If the Redbacks [South Australia] make the Sheffield Shield final and it is hosted in Adelaide, we will have a scenario where we will have a Rolling Stones concert on one Saturday, the first AFL [Australian rules] football match here the following Saturday, and then taking the footy trays out, dropping the cricket pitch in and playing the final before lifting them out and putting on AFL footy the following Saturday. That is what a multi-sport venue is all about. Everyone has been totally committed to it. You can see that because only 20 months ago the old stands were still here. The demolition has happened and you can see the results of everyone working together. I was very fortunate when I arrived there was commitment from all parties to proceed. Funding was in place and there was the will to move ahead. Both football and cricket recognised that you can't just stand still. You can't rest on your laurels. You need to move with the times and offer the paying public, who now have many choices to spend their money, something which something truly world class. Not that the traditionalists were completely sidelined in Adelaide. The ground's scoreboard, the grassy mound at the north end and the Moreton Bay fig trees remain, protected from development under state law. In the design we did not want to make it one stand all the way round. Each of the stands has an individual structure to it. We wanted to create that ambience and intimacy that can be lost in a big sporting arena," Bradshaw said. We also wanted to make sure that while we are having 50,000 seats they still had a fantastic view of the action on the ground. There is no part of the Oval that has been untouched. We have relaid the turf and the drop-in pitches to make it truly all-round sporting venue. At the end of the cricket season they are lifted out and the footy trays are dropped in. For Bradshaw the project was on hold for five weeks as he fought a recurrence of the multiple myeloma, a form of bone cancer, which he first suffered while chief executive of the MCC. He has put off a final dose of chemotherapy until after the second Ashes Test. The treatment will last two months and is designed to extend his period of remission for the disease. "I had no choice in terms of having to have the treatment," he said. It provided me with a great motivation to get back. It is very frustrating to have been working so hard on such an exciting project with such tight deadlines and budget constraints to then effectively walk away for five or six weeks. I am very fortunate I have a talented team around me and I was lucky to be able to come back and work a lot sooner than projected. To now be able to sit back and enjoy it, I feel a great sense of pride. It is a treatable but not curable disease. There is a reality that it will come back a lot stronger than previously. I am hopeful the research and wonderful people who work in medicine will come up with a cure some day. "I am incredibly passionate about this project but the disease does put things in perspective, hence I travelled back to Tasmania two nights before the Test for my daughter's school-leavers" dinner so I could do the father-daughter dance with her. Life is in perspective.