Summer Sports - Cricket
and replaced with new, free of charge, as part of the student’s forestry training programme.” Another example of Brian’s canny management of the Preston Nomads acres. With rural Sussex surrounding it, the club’s need to encourage wildlife is hardly pressing, but, as conservation is a passion for Brian, where possible he strives to let his job and the natural world live in harmony. With chemicals application reducing, the need for pest control to be administered with a heavy hand becomes less viable, but they still have their place in today’s maintenance regime. “Chafer grubs in particular are drawn to our sandy outfields,” says Brian. “They attract the birds, which cause havoc, rip up the turf and leave us with a bill we’d rather not incur,” he adds. “We’ve doubled our budget for insecticide in the last year, rising to over £800 to rid the outfield of the grubs. Our level of damage is fairly modest compared to some clubs locally, where birds have torn the square up and left significant damage for them to make good.”
In an ideal world, Brian would like to have no chemical input, but sadly this is still some way off, he says, and coupled with the rising spot treatment costs is the overall spend on fertiliser, which has risen dramatically with the growing unpredictability of the seasons. “Our slow-release applications on the first square have really been beefed-up,
but we are still behind on our feeding programme, due to the lack of real spring weather,” he says. “We need rain, sun and rain. Prolonged bouts of rain and drought are the worst kind of weather, especially as renovations have been so delayed.”
Contrary to the decade of investment and transformation of the first square, the third and fourth team square is fertiliser free, yet Brian dubs it “how a cricket square should look”, following a renovation last year. “The density, grass cover and colour is spot on and, once the we are up to speed with the time we’ve lost over this spring, the square should look just so for the new season.”
As the noughties dawned, it might have seemed hard to believe that the club would host anything other than amateur fixtures but, with the Sussex CCC connection and the investment made across the board, Preston Nomads are now in a position where they are able to host international events. The ICC Division 1 Championships will be held in the UK for the first this year, and the tiny village of Fulking will be the destination. In addition, the venue will host its first Twenty20 fixtures this year, seeing some of the biggest spectator numbers in the club’s history. Working day to day in this tranquil spot would be manna from heaven for most, especially as we usher in the (hopefully) long, warm summer days, but
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JUNE/JULY 2013 PC 65
Brian’s drive for turf perfection (he labels himself “a bit OCD”) and career progression mean it might be hard to imagine him ending his working days here.
“Moving on certainly would be difficult; the standards here are very high, budgets are good and the club are extremely supportive, but I relish a challenge, so I’ll have to wait to see what happens - a private school job, with a mix of sports and a large acreage would be tempting. For now, I still have plenty to achieve here as we prepare for our busiest season in the club’s history.”
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