Summer Sports - Cricket


Tim Clare, Head Groundsman at Allscott Cricket Club, details the work undertaken after cows invaded the ground and how a NatWest Cricket Force day fired member’s enthusiasm


New season, new square A


fter a long hard winter, littered with prolonged periods of rain and then more recently freezing temperatures and heavy snow showers, April finally arrived. In my twenty years of looking after the ground at Allscott, I cannot remember a worse time weather-wise than the last twelve months.


Typical, as this has been a particularly busy time at the club. With the help of our insurance company and the expertise of our neighbours, ALS, the cricket square was completely relaid at the end of September. This was due to an untimely pitch invasion of around twenty stray cows last July.


It happened during one of the many wet spells we had last summer, which only served to magnify the amount of damage caused by our unwelcome guests. There’s a lesson to be learned here for anyone out there who does not have insurance ... you never know what’s around the corner! Materials for the repairs on the square included twenty tonnes of Boughton Club loam and eight bags of MM22 wicket seed. Repairs to the outfield were also undertaken by deep aerating to lift up the hoof marks, scarification to create a seed bed, and then twenty bags of MM50 outfield seed and 120 tonnes of sand was used to level out the playing area. We added some Maxwell Premier Sports 9:7:7 winter fertiliser to the square at the end of December to help it through the winter months. I began rolling the newly laid square in


104 PC APRIL/MAY 2013


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