Winter Sports - Rugby Union
KEYNOTE interview
Alan Ferguson, St George’s Park
It seems hard to believe that Alan Ferguson has been at the FA’s St George’s Park for well over two years. Considered to be one of the finest groundsmen working in football, for many years he was at Portman Road, the home of Ipswich Town FC, where he won many accolades for his stadium pitch. It is this high standard, along with his attention for detail, that made him the obvious choice for the Burton upon Trent facility.
In this question and answer session, Alan explains how things have moved on since his appointment and the FA’s plans for the future
How long is it since you came to St George’s Park?
I came up here in August 2011, it’s amazing how time flies, and we are busier now than we have ever been.
St George’s Park is a very impressive place. People are blown away by its size. It’s not like a training ground on a fifty acre site with four or five pitches. We have 330 acres with the potential to grow further.
What facilities do you oversee?
There are ten grass and two synthetic pitches.
Club England teams, the three lions, have five elite pitches. These are the ones with heating, lights and irrigation and can be played on morning, noon and night.
I believe you already have development plans in hand?
We have already spent £105 million getting the park open, and we’ve already upgraded one of the two Fibresand pitches to Desso, which was absolutely essential. The Board has given approval to upgrade and consolidate the other pitches. That is to see the upgrading of four out of the five natural pitches to become Fibresand, and the remaining Fibresand pitch will become a Desso.
There is work already being done in the hotel to ensure we get more private dining areas for teams that visit, along with private meeting rooms for the elite teams coming in. If we have a few teams on site, each will need to have their own private facility to sit down as a group in complete privacy, so all of that has been expanded.
What sort of usage do you have?
The key users of the site have increased their activity by a third since we opened. That includes all levels of England football,
42 I PC APRIL/MAY 2014
corporate and community teams that come to use this facility.
We have a good number of charity matches to accommodate, such as Help For Heroes, Cerebral Palsy and Partially Sighted days. In 2015, we will be hosting the Cerebral Palsy World Cup Series.
We have now graduated to playing a number of UEFA development tournaments where all the teams actually stay on site and we have even played matches on our main pitches.
I think the landscape on the football side is changing slightly. We were only ever supposed to be a training environment but, because of requirements, some of the pitches are having infrastructure built into them to put small stands that can accommodate up to 500 spectators. And, because it is such a wide open space, and with the weather and climate we have, we need somewhere for them to sit and, of course, toilet facilities. So, as soon as we
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The key users of the site have increased their activity by a third since we opened. That includes all levels of England football, corporate and community teams that come to use this facility
THE
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