Click here for a bigger version of Marc Aspland's Wembley Subbuteo pitch picture

England are trying to make Wembley into a fortress; I have tried to make Wembley look like a Subbuteo pitch. The Times was granted permission by the FA and Wembley Stadium for exclusive access to the television gantry in the middle tier opposite the players’ tunnel.

Squeezed between two High Definition television cameras and a host of cables and boxes, I was directly in line with the halfway line for the players’ presentation and the kick-off. The view afforded high above the pitch was startlingly different from what I am used to.

By using a tilt-and-shift lens I was able to alter the plane of focus. Normal single-lens reflex cameras have a plane of focus that runs vertically and, by using a very narrow aperture, the depth of field is small. These are the action pictures from the pitch-side that you are used to seeing in this newspaper.

A tilt-and-shift lens changes the focus plane from the vertical to the horizontal, which means that the foreground and background above and below the subject are out of focus, giving the dramatic effect of making the subjects seem as if playing on a Subbuteo table.

As Steven Gerrard lined up a free kick, I manually focused the tilt-and-shift lens on to the goal-mouth. As the ball was whipped in, Emile Heskey and the defender went up for the ball and this startling and dramatic image was captured. By making the top half and the bottom half of the frame out of focus, the players look dramatically small and Wembley takes on a different aspect.

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