“Clubs should always produce the best pitches they can, with the focus on the strength of the players, not the weakness of the opposition”
Nigel Gray, Head Groundsman, Hampshire CCC
extensive. “We have the luxury of being able to offer more facilities while games are being played than all other clubs, with the exception of Lord’s who are on a par with us,” he states. Plans to move Hampshire CCC from the Northlands Road site were first raised in 1987 when committee members looked into building a second tier over the car park, only to discover that there were restrictions on any expansion of the 100-year old site. By June 1988 committee members found a suitable alternative, forty acres at West End, owned by Queen’s College, Oxford. The College offered the land on a 999-year lease and, in October 1988, Eastleigh Borough Council granted outline planning permission for the main stadium and nursery ground.
The estimated £24m project was
remarkable for the level of funding Hampshire attracted, securing one of the biggest grants for a build of this kind - a National Lottery Sports Fund award of nearly £7.2m in August 1996 - with the target of first-class cricket being played there by 2001. The freehold on the 7.68-acre Northlands Road county ground was sold in early 1998 to Berkeley Homes (Hampshire) Ltd for more than £5m, to be paid in stages, with in-built increases to allow for any rise in the house price index.
In late August 1999 the 9-hole golf course opened, with completion of the clubhouse and the nursery ground
pavilion a year later in May 2000. Work on the main pavilion, atrium and cricket academy began in January 2000, prior to play getting underway the following year.
Nigel has been on the groundstaff since the club moved from Northlands Road, managing the golf groundsmanship for the first eight years before taking up his current position as overall manager of green areas.
Before his time at Northlands Road, he spent ten years with Hampshire County Council, maintaining school playing fields, colleges and private schools with good cricket squares, only moving away from local authority work “when private tendering came into force”. “The shape of groundsmanship has changed a lot in my time,” Nigel states. “The age of guys coming into the profession has dropped dramatically, meaning they are now much more mobile and increasingly see this industry as a step on to other careers.” The focus of visual and other media in cricket has catapulted groundstaff into the limelight more than ever, he goes on - the Ashes victory beings a classic case in point. “The job is definitely more intense than it used to be and the emphasis on TV greater than ever,” he adds. Under the redevelopment, attention to the requirements of the media will be high on the agenda. The hotel that will be built at the stadium will include
rooms overlooking the ground that can be converted into media centres on match days.
The challenges involved with maintaining the playing standards expected from a category A ground came into sharp focus this summer. Still less than a decade old, the Rose Bowl has surmounted its own fair share of hurdles to arrive where it stands today, Nigel recounts. “We had some well documented issues with our square in the first few years,” he recalls. “The wickets were very lively and the bounce was a concern for us. The original square was constructed with twelve inches of Ongar loam on top of a similar depth of stone-compacted bed. The loam tended to crack when it dried out, causing the pitch to move, which affected ball bounce.”
Of the twenty strips on the square when Nigel took full charge of cricket, one had been laid differently, with an eight inch base layer, loam compacted with excavate, two inches of screen loam and an element of sand. “Ten years ago, sand was a material under test at top-flight clubs looking for pitches to assist spin bowlers,” Nigel explains. “Although it was not the answer, sand did minimise cracks in the loam, so we used it as our model for designing the rest of the square, and a further two of these constructions are planned this autumn.” Nigel found that a sand base
produced a better bounce, with the
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 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132