When, in 2003, Frank Boahene, the then Head of Corporate Grounds at Fulham FC, was asked to act as a consultant to the Ghanaian Sports Ministry in the run up to the African Nations Cup neither he, nor the Ministry, realised just how much work was required to get everything ready for the tournament.
Building for the I
first got involved in the project in 2003 having been invited by the Ghanaian Minister of Education, Science and Sport as an advisor on all football pitch related issues. My initial brief was to give the Ministry an assessment on the stadiums and pitches that they had chosen and report on how they could best be improved. With the initial reports completed, the Ministry realised that there was far more work to be done than they had originally anticipated. From 2003-2006 I acted as a consultant to the Ministry on all pitch related issues. During these three years my own club, Fulham FC, allowed me to go on secondment to advise the
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AFRICAN CUP OF NATIONS
Ghanaians. The authorities in Ghana paid for my flights and all expenses. In 2006 I left Fulham when there was the opportunity to work full time in Ghana.
Over the last five years the scope of work has increased. Originally, I was asked to help develop and construct the four main stadium pitches at Sekondi Takaradi, Kumasi, Tamale and the capital, Accra. Following that their was the requirement to build a number of core training centres, in preparation for the African Cup of Nations. There were sixteen centres in total, seven of which were given to my company, Green Grass Technology, to build from scratch.
At each of these centres we built ‘academy style’ changing facilities to support all the pitches, which included full medical facilities. These centres were built to a specification modelled on a Premiership facility. At El-Wak, in Accra, there was a dusty
area on an old military site, dating back to the 1950’s and used as a football pitch. Very little money had been spent on the pitch over the years and there was no irrigation. The plan was to rip it all out and bring it up to, what we consider to be, a modern pitch standard and install a full drainage system. A fully automated irrigation pitch system had never been installed before in Ghana!
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