Winter Sports - Rugby World Cup
Neville Johnson went to one of the country’s newest football stadiums just months before it breaks new ground as the first to stage a Rugby World Cup game. It’s an impressive venue and very pleasing on the eye, both inside and outside. Championship rather than Premiership standing at present, rightly did nothing to dissuade its choice as a venue. It has a Head Groundsman, in Steve Winterburn, who is so ready for the challenge too
Rugby World Cup
Steve Winterburn, Head Groundsman at Brighton’s American Express Community Stadium
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Albion’s whole new ball game
t’s nearly 200 years since schoolboy William Webb Ellis ‘picked up the ball’ during a game of football and ran with it at Rugby School, supposedly setting it rolling for Rugby Union. When either
South Africa or Japan kick off the first Pool B match in the 2015 Rugby World Cup on September 19th at Brighton and Hove Albion’s American Express Community Stadium, the game he started will, in a way, be getting back to its roots. Two teams on a football pitch will be competing to progress in a tournament, with a trophy bearing the founder of rugby’s name, the prize. “Funny old game”, the 19th century clergyman who allegedly changed the shape of winter pitch games might say.
The Rugby World Cup is the greatest prize in Rugby Union and has been contested every four years since 1987. It is controlled by World Rugby, formerly known as the
50 I PC APRIL/MAY 2015
International Rugby Board. This year’s World Cup is in the hands of England Rugby 2015, based, not surprisingly, at Twickenham and set up specifically to organise the tournament.
England Rugby 2015 said, at the outset,
that they would balance getting maximum ticket revenue with reaching new audiences for the game. There were eyebrows raised by traditionalists though when a match schedule, featuring just four traditional rugby grounds, was announced last year. All told, there will be forty-eight matches
played and sixteen of them will be at football grounds, the first two at Brighton’s Amex. The City of Manchester Stadium, St James Park Newcastle, Elland Road, Villa Park, Leicester City’s King Power Stadium and Stadium MK at Milton Keynes are the others, but it is Brighton where football stages its first rugby kick-off. On this spring day, and
after the rigours of 75% of the season, it looked immaculate, ready for any big match - football or rugby. For the record, of the original list of seventeen stadiums originally under consideration, those at Coventry City, Bristol City, Derby County, Southampton and Sunderland missed the cut. When I asked Head Groundsman Steve
Winterburn why Brighton was chosen, he said that geography and infrastructure were big factors, as was the stadium’s excellent crowd facilities. Surely though, the quality of the surface he produces made a big tick in the appropriate box? He smiled and modestly said that his was as good as others in the reckoning. The organisers had always aimed to spread
the tournament around the country and, in the Pool stages, take it beyond its heartlands. In the south, the Amex was one they had looked at from the start. After several visits,
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