The Fall and Rise of Mark Perrin!
Nearly thirty years on, however, Sainsbury’s continues to flourish, whilst the adjacent housing that lines one side of the ground looks as new as the day it was erected.
In stark contrast, the stadium is tired and played out, a good proportion of its plastic seating suffering the effects of disintegration by the sun’s ultraviolet light. Financial constraints, administration and the economic downturn had left Selhurst Park groundstaff with precious little money to spend on operational essentials, such as the end of season pitch renovation. ”I couldn’t gain sign-off for even the smallest purchase, it was that bad,” confesses Head Groundsman, Mark Perrin.
Survival on a shoe-string was the
reality for Mark and his team, as was redundancy, when he was forced to bid a reluctant farewell to one of his staff as administration bit hard and deep across the whole club.
Heading up a perilously slimmed down team of just three, forty-four year old Mark admits there were times when he had to consider his own future amid talk of closure as a buyer failed to materialise.
But, that was in the bad old dismal days, three months ago. Despite all the
turmoil around him, as acrimony soured the departure of the previous owner and uncertainty hung over everyone, Mark has continued to produce a playing surface fit for Championship, not to say Premiership, football in the face of fierce adversity and against all the odds. Starting off life in cricket, a sport he admits is his “first love”, Mancunian Mark’s first job was at south-west Manchester club, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, where he worked from 1989 to 1992. Passionate about playing cricket since a
boy, and developing into a useful, successful all-rounder in the Manchester leagues while growing up, Mark was always drawn to a career in the game, explaining that, on leaving education, it was a natural progression for him. “I was always a better cricketer but enjoyed watching football far more, so had always considered taking a position at a football club,” he expands. After leaving Chorlton-cum-Hardy to seek “a greater challenge”, he moved to a post at Manchester Grammar School, drawn there by “its many sports pitches and especially its cricket square”, which he took pleasure in maintaining until 1995 when he took his first steps into professional football, joining Stockport County FC as head groundsman. “I enjoyed my time at Stockport,” he
recalls, “but, after four years there, I felt it was time to leave. The best jobs in this business will always be in the south-east, so I made the move down here and was lucky to find a very nice post at St Mary’s College in Twickenham, where they were looking to develop their sports pitches.” As grounds manager, he was charged with looking after the site’s plethora of pitches. Yet, as the position proved to be “more office based than I’d been used to”, when the head groundsman vacancy came up at Crystal Palace he leaped at the chance and, in 2005, made the move further south still. And, with true northern grit, he is still there. Since Palace fell from the Premier League in 2004, the budget Mark has to play with has shrunk year on year, to the point where he and his two assistants - Phil Down, who works at the Beckenham training ground, and Gareth Read, who assists him at Selhurst Park, are forced to argue their case for every penny. “An extra member of staff would be great, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon, given the recent redundancies and tight budgets,” he states with resignation. “We’ll just have to cope as well as we can with the three of us.” You sense that he has grown adept at ‘coping strategies’ in his years here but, as the financial rot set in, other
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