New owner, but everything still on a budget Report by DAVE SALTMAN
Compton Training Ground
Renovating WOLVES
Vertidraining
WOLVERHAMPTON Wanderers FC has recently been sold for a tenner to businessman Steve Morgan under the pre-requisite to the former owner, Sir Jack Hayward, that £30 million will be pumped into the club. No doubt the money will be wisely spent, maybe even on a new pitch at some point but, for now, the purse strings are as tightly drawn as ever and so they should be. For the second year running the
Seeding with Vredo
Groundstaff (Terry, Wayne and Ken) undertook much of the renovation works themselves. After a season of monitoring how the stadium and training ground pitches had played, specifications were drawn up by PSD (Northwest) Ltd. In particular, the very wet winter had highlighted the poor drainage that predominates the Billy Wright wing of the stadium pitch, so 500 linear metres of additional drains were to be installed along with sand banding across approximately 1500 square metres.
Having been impressed with the quality of work and flexibility of contractor Derek Crane, it was decided to stay with him again this year, so tenders weren’t issued out to anybody else. After the inevitable ‘up in the air’ end to the playing season finally panned out, work started at the Compton training ground. Derek’s staff fraize mowed the youth team pitch area (10,000 sq
Seed slots
metres), removing the vegetation and stockpiling rubbish in the car park. The pitch was then hollow cored to a 100mm depth at 50mm centres, a monotonous job that, at 14 minutes a run, took over 13 hours to complete! Once done, this enabled the pitch to be topdressed with 80 tons of MM45 sand and then seeded with 350kgs of BAR 7. The Dakota top dresser and Vredo disc seeder had been hired, via Derek Crane, from Campey Turf Care and made the Groundstaff jobs much easier to undertake. The Dakota took about 5 tons of material each load and was filled quickly and comfortably using a small 2-ton hired Bobcat. The spread of the material could be adjusted electronically from a control box that was wired into the tractor cab. The control box could adjust the speed of the conveyor belt inside the hopper as well as the spinning discs that threw out the material. Within a load or two, it was possible to gauge the equipment so as to discharge all of the material in two full runs of the pitch. When topdressing large quantities of material, it is important that you can spread the material evenly, as well as quickly. The Dakota hopper trails the tractor and sits on four wide tyres that almost touch each other, spreading the weight evenly and not leaving any ruts in the pitch surface. The first thing that impressed us
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108