Winter Sports - Rugby World Cup
Pressures for groundsmen during the Rugby World Cup
Graeme and Dave’s comments highlight the pressures the groundsmen preparing for the World Cup faced. Colin Mumford and Neil Pettican, from the Bayer Turf Solutions team, further discuss the challenges that groundsmen had to overcome during the World Cup 2015 with David Bates from Total Turf Solutions.
David Bates, Technical Director of the independent sports turf consultancy Total Turf Solutions, was appointed by Sport England as a consultant to implement a major initiative designed to improve playing surfaces at ‘grass roots’ level. David knew that the lack of a recovery window was potentially a big challenge during the tournament.
“The football stadiums hosting World Cup games would have certainly lost a recovery window, where there is usually a break in fixtures for renovation, such as aeration, overseeding and putting covers down to help with germination,” he says.
“The problem would have been having the time to do everything they needed to, and each head groundsman will have had a different challenge. For rugby grounds like Kingsholm, they also had the added pressure of home games for their own teams. The football stadiums will have had the pressure of alternating between football and rugby matches, and changing markings in real time pressured situations," says David.
According to Colin Mumford, the recovery challenge was directly impacted by the threat of bad weather. “The pitches would have been constantly (depending on the number of matches) exposed to wear and damage that
needed to be repaired and the grass re-established."
In 2008 and 2009, Colin held the post of a technical officer at the New Zealand Sports Turf Institute (NZSTI). At this time, the NZSTI were employed by the 2011 Rugby World Cup organising committee to evaluate stadia vying to be selected for the 2011 tournament.
During the evaluation process Colin and colleagues visited grounds, including the Westpac Stadium, in Wellington, to assess a number of turf performance criteria stipulated by the Rugby World Cup. “Key criteria assessed were: grass composition, surface infiltration and drainage, surface levels, surface hardness and bare patches, and pitches not only had to meet strict measures on total area of bare patches, but no single patch could exceed a particular size,” says Colin.
“From my experience, I know the pressures groundsmen are under. And adding to the stress is the weather that is generally a lot colder in the UK than New Zealand. At this time of year, the temperatures drop, and recovery is slower. If it was a venue that was hosting multiple games, the groundsmen had a lot of work to reinstate the pitch for the next match,” he says.
“Drainage capabilities, soil profile and irrigation all needed to be performing well to ensure the turf had the best chance of standing up to the beating it got and the lack of recovery time available,” says Colin.
Pressure; what pressure?
Neil Pettican from Bayer has worked on a number of international class multi sports events at Wembley stadium and knows what a ‘buzz’ they create. He was in no doubt that the groundstaff would be putting in all the hours necessary.
“Groundsmen shouldn’t have needed to implement different practices, but the wear and tear was bound to increase, especially for those stadia with six big games in a fortnight, and there were Rugby World Cup games as well as their league fixtures.”
“Repairing the pitch, to get it ready for the next game, and the TV cameras, would have been a long process. Many groundsmen were working under the floodlights to make every hour count. By the end of the Rugby World Cup, the groundstaff and the pitch would, ideally, need a well-earned break - unfortunately, the structured season will not allow for this. It’s the life of a groundsman, but what an experience the World Cup must have been!"
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PC OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015 I 69
SEE US AT SALTEX 4-5 November 2015 Stand K009
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