Winter Sports - Football
GR SSCUTTER Good weather - bad weather?
Our anonymous groundsman, Mr AKA Grasscutter, offers his thanks to Mother Nature and hopes that the Meteorological Office have got the long range forecast all wrong!
As I write this during the early part of October, we are well into the new season. Somewhat true to form, our team sit just outside the play-off slots, a position we occupied for most of last season.
Occasionally, we would dip into the play-off positions, briefly offering hope to our fans, before dropping back out again. I think we will see similar this season.
The spell of fine weather at the end of September/early October provided us with some strong grass growth and, with soil temperatures still pretty high, that bodes well as we head into winter, although the long range forecast is predicting a harsh one. Mind you, the Met Office has been wrong before; weren’t we promised a hot summer? I know August is supposed to be the wettest summer month, but this year’s surpassed itself in our region.
Sadly, we don’t have the luxury of ‘international breaks’ so, from here on in, our schedule is pretty hectic, especially if we have a good run in one of the cup competitions. Any bad weather means that fixtures can pile up pretty quickly and, apart from frost sheets, we don’t have any other luxuries to help keep Mother Nature at bay.
That said, I am fortunate to have a team of matchday volunteers who help me out and, when the weather does turn nasty, the fans usually rally round to help clear snow as well. What would we do without them?
Our training grounds are the other side of town and they are more affected by the weather, being in a high and exposed spot. They are shared facilities, so the resident groundsman does much of the work, although we get involved with one of the pitches that the first team train on.
There’s a 3G surface here and it’s a complete pain in the butt during bad weather, to be honest. The biggest issue is its ‘all weather’ tag, so it is assumed that it can be played on in ‘all weathers’. For example, no amount of explaining about snow removal taking away the infill as well seems to get through, so we often find ourselves starting the job, before someone finally sees the folly of our efforts.
There are plans to build an indoor facility, so “
I am fortunate to have a team of match day volunteers that help me out and, when the weather does turn nasty, the fans usually rally round to help
hopefully that will ease this problem. In truth, when it’s cold, the players aren’t too happy playing ‘up on the hill’ anyway and often revert to training on the stadium pitch, which puts even more pressure on it.
Fortunately, our current manager, and the coaches, does understand the importance of moving repetitive training exercises around the pitch to reduce high wear. Would that they were all like that, especially the away team coaches, many of whom simply ignore my requests.
I watched a good number of the Rugby World Cup games on ITV and the pitches have looked really good, although I still haven’t worked out the relevance of the Orang Utang, as cute as he or she was. Fair play to the football groundsmen who needed to convert their pitches to rugby just for one or two games. That will have tested their
skills - and their patience, no doubt - but the extra revenue for the clubs outside the Premier League would have been most welcome.
It’s a shame that England didn’t make it out of the pool stages and something that the organisers perhaps need to address. Three of the top five sides in the world in one pool didn’t feel right to me. Regardless of whether it was England, Wales or Australia that didn’t progress, one of those teams missing out on a quarter final slot was always going to happen, whilst a lesser team from another pool made it through.
England are a young team and need time to develop. It was a similar scenario in 1999 and look what happened in 2003!
Keep the faith, and keep cutting the grass. After all, that’s all we do!
PC OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015 I 77
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156