Equestrian
Peter with the club’s custom-made divot roller
“We need to do what we can to get deeper rooting and, by using the Verti- drain all year round, we are getting a deeper profile and less damaging divoting”
The club’s Verti-Drain 7526 at work pre-season
Hooves and sticks: plenty of divots they do make
season and three times during playing months to give Peter advice, in particular on the amount of added magnesium required. Steve will also carry out periodic soil testing. The club’s pitch turf is 100 percent ryegrass. Peter says he’d like to switch to stronger smooth-stalked varieties for Grounds One and Two but, at the moment, fixture commitment means it is an impractical project. It would mean closing the two show pitches in August for ‘burning’ and scarifying before re-seeding, but it's something for the future. Horses are not great respecters of turf and Peter has forty tonnes of divot mix - 70:30 ryegrass seed and sand/soil - always to hand during the playing season for running repairs. Divot replacement is a massive job, of course, mostly labour intensive and, just like course managers in horseracing, Peter hires a gang of ten workers specifically to handle it. He also has a custom-built roller for the task. Unlike horseracing though, the divots do not all go in the same direction, so it’s much more painstaking work. There is a tradition in polo that, in match breaks, spectators go on to the pitch to help put the divots back. It’s called ‘divot stomping’ and is as much a means of socialising as pitch care, but Peter certainly welcomes this unofficial help. Overwhelmingly, Peter says, the main pitch upkeep requirement is safety, both for the riders and the horses. Nothing overrides this. He has to provide a surface with what he calls ‘trust and comfort’ factors. It is a sport with inherent dangers anyway. It is the groundsman’s job to see these are kept to the absolute minimum. Also, polo is no different to other ball games on grass, in that another essential is to see that ball movement over the surface is as consistent as possible - divots notwithstanding! Verti-draining is the key to
White, hard plastic and only slightly bigger than a cricket ball. The Guards Club has its own
116 PC APRIL/MAY 2013
producing safe and consistent Polo turf, says Peter. In the past, compaction relief hadn’t perhaps been done
enough. The rooting profile here is naturally shallow and a 500 kilo horse is always going to disrupt it extensively. “We need to do what we can to get deeper rooting and, by using the Verti- drain all year round, we are getting a deeper profile and less damaging divoting,” says Peter.
The tine depth he uses varies, but ahead of first play on Grounds 4, 5, 6 and 8, for instance, he spreads sand and then verti-drains with shorter 15cm tines, 12mm wide. This job alone takes about three weeks. Peter says the club has always had a Verti-drain, but in the past it was used only over winter. He is getting better results now it is playing a year round role. For pitch marking, Peter uses a laser linemarker. It too is a major task, taking one of the team from 8.00am until 2.00pm each day during the playing season and, because some of the pitches, other than Grounds One and Two, interject each other, some used lines have to be painted green for each fresh match. There is one particularly match day
responsibility not shared by Peter’s counterparts in other sports. He is in charge of the horse ambulance and is alerted into action by radio if removal of an injured horse to the on-site vet box is ever necessary. Fortunately, this is not very often. Peter says he doesn’t have close contact with players, so feedback regarding how the pitches are playing comes to him via regular Grounds Committee meetings, which he attends. Neil Hobday, the Club’s Chief Executive heads up this committee, which includes other club officials and some respected senior players. The rules are actually quite straightforward, with safety at the core. In a very small nutshell, here are the fundamentals: Two teams of four try to hit the ball between goalposts eight yards apart to score. Each time there is a goal, teams change ends, so field and wind conditions are fairly shared. Matches last up to an hour and a half, divided
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