Alan and Stuart inside the hut!
work with what you’ve got. Yes, it can be frustrating, but the majority of the players in the island play just domestic cricket, only a few represent the island, and you have got to respect that because they pay their money just like anybody else. To start with, the job at the KGV was just about good management and that’s all there was to it, although I did inherit a fault which was a root break on the square, and it is not easy to address that. To be fair, when the square was laid
here in the 1990s, it was not professionally done. That is not a criticism, because it was the people involved in Guernsey cricket who did it voluntarily at the time. They knew it was the way forward and they took steps to put it in place. After I had been here a couple of years, they laid a new square at Port Soif, which is the ground of Rovers - the only
“Because the island is small and some machinery you only need once or twice a year, certain equipment can be shared between venues”
club who have their own ground in the island. We, as groundsmen for the Guernsey
Cricket Board, look after both those grounds - KGV and Port Soif - and assist and advise on the square at the College Field, the ground of Elizabeth College. They may be a little more than a mile apart, if that, but the KGV and Port Soif are extremely different. Although both are picturesque
grounds, the KGV is tree-lined, and long considered the home of Guernsey cricket, whereas Rovers’ headquarters have developed, from a solitary football pitch with a small corrugated iron hut that served as a dressing room, to one of the island’s premier sporting facilities. Port Soif is on the coast and a wide- open playing field. It is made up of different soils under the square, which was professionally laid.
There is a tremendous wind-factor
there. The wind will burn the grass and it will dry it out abnormally quickly. One of the problems is that, if you get a drying wind and sunshine, it will dry the top inch out quickly but, underneath that, it will still be quite damp and that can lead to slower wickets. Like Port Soif, the KGV square has eleven pitches on it, but it does have different qualities. Currently at KGV we use Surrey loam, and only the club one at the moment, but we are thinking of going up to a county standard, one with a bit more clay in it, in an effort to get a bit more pace and bounce. Port Soif is constructed with Boughton Loam which gives the wickets different characteristics although they are so close geographically.
At the start of every new season, I have
looked at what we have done previously and thought “we have got to raise the
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