“Some people thought I was taking a gamble putting Pro Select in a stadium environment”


difference. My first objective was to plan the


renovations around the Pink concert in June which, I calculated, would give me five weeks to establish everything, bar the stage end, before it was covered. I worked this into two parts - the stage end in the south stand and the rest of the pitch.


I calculated accurately using the drawings given to me by the promoter. My plan was to renovate the whole 8200 square metres, but to put additional dressing on the stage end to allow for compression from the weight on the aluminum pads, and only seed up to where the stage was going, as to me it seemed to make no sense to grow something for it to be killed off and, once the aluminum was removed, waste more precious growing time ripping it all back out before I could reseed. The plan was to tilth the stage end and


relieve any compaction and seed as soon as possible. As part of my plan, I hired an MLR12 1000w portable lighting rig for the five weeks I had before the first game.


My main aim was to get back to the Xtragrass synthetic fibres that had been


buried in over 300 tonnes of material over the five years the club has been at the Ricoh and, hopefully, give it one last chance to get working for us as a reinforced system again. So, Premier Pitches moved in with


their Koro and caravan and got to work, removing over 35mm of vegetation and soil to eventually reveal the tip of the artificial fibres, and turf cut around all the kerbs to completely remove the lot. We then had to try to break up the original dressing that sat within the Xtragrass system. So, we used a combination of a straight spring rake and a specialist Blec machine used to renovate Desso pitches to achieve this which, on the whole, worked well. We still had a few areas where the


fibres weren’t quite as prominent as I would have liked, but they weren’t far away, and certainly were closer than ever before.


I then opted to topdress the pitch with fifty tonnes of a sterilised 80/20 mix from Mansfield Sands. I did this as, in the


past, we had suffered with terrible dry patch and leeching, so my thoughts were that this would help retain some moisture and nutrient within the profile, without decreasing the infiltration rates too much, and retaining too much moisture.


Once this had been brushed and vertidrained in, and fed with Scotts 8:12:8 pre-seeder with trace elements, it was seeding time. After year long trials at the training


ground (just before I left for Aston Villa) and also on a small area off the pitches at their training ground, we had trialed Scotts new Pro Select 1 seed and found the colour, density, rooting and resilience of this grass seed, although not yet trialed by the STRI, was performing fantastically well.


Some people thought I was taking a gamble putting this in a stadium


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