“A club like us can lose as much as £10,000 if a game has to be postponed and rescheduled for midweek”
“For three weeks over November and December we had the frost covers out on almost a
permanent basis. Even then, they can only do so much, and for the sort of temperatures we were seeing - below minus 4O
C - they
inefficient drainage system and a pitch that sees precious little, if any, daylight, with the exception of the goal by the family end, made his arrival an eventful one, he says.
“Until last year, when the club invested in new drainage, the winter months would be particularly bad to drain and to achieve decent growth on the pitch. With three-quarters of the pitch in shade and without the luxury of grow lights that Premier League sides can afford, it’s sometimes been a struggle to get the best from the surface.”
The bitter winter that brought the UK to a standstill in December had left its mark at Brisbane Road - fixture cancellations aside, the aftermath of the blanket of snow that damaged the pitch was still evident months later, as Colin showed me the most affected areas. “The freeze really hit us hard,” he says.
ceased to be of use and the effect of the
snow mould we suffered were evident once the snow had cleared.”
The blackened algae-like areas on the turf were more apparent in the areas most deprived of sunlight and helped highlight, for him, one of the growing pressures in the games - ensuring that fixtures are played, even through dreadfully poor weather.
“From my point of view it can be stressful, especially working alone, to ensure cancellations are a rarity,” stresses Colin. “A club like us can lose as much as £10,000 if a game has to be postponed and rescheduled for the middle of the week, a loss that will increase if it’s a big crowd or a derby, so heavy pressure is placed on groundsmen to ensure games are played,” he continues.
“This desire to fulfil fixtures is finely balanced with the long-term damage it
can inflict on the playing surface, which can ultimately affect performance over time, so the decision on my part has to be a reasoned and forward-thinking one that looks at financial costs for the club and the pitch.”
The effects of last winter’s snow produced some of the most severe turf damage he had ever seen in over twenty years in the industry, made worst by the need to continue playing, allowing little time for grass to recover. “I did what I could to help the situation, yet the Chipco Green and liquid iron that I applied had little effect, as what was really needed was sunlight and time to recover - a luxury not afforded in professional football now. Good growth is hard enough at the best of times here - the cold and wet only add to the problems.”
It was a stroke of luck for Colin that the severe weather didn’t descend a year earlier, as the club’s existing drainage network was more than twenty years old and was highly inefficient for the modern game, he says. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, and 2010 saw the installation of the much-needed drainage, combined with laying of a new Fibresand pitch.
“Flooding was common here prior to our new system. We would get pooling at the far corner in the area that also gets the least sunlight, so we were hit with a
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YOUR SUCCESS - OUR SPECIALTY 65
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