Winter Sports - Football
“ Ryan Powell
It was unbelievable, because I’ve never seen the pitch taken down to the gravel carpet and the undersoil heating
” 90 I PC DECEMBER/JANUARY 2016
It’s a fantastic place. I love it more and more each year. It inspires me more and more as I learn more
Goodison Park
capacity at the cricket ground, and then went for a job at Everton, when it came up, and got on the apprenticeship programme. “It’s a fantastic place. I love it more and
more each year. It inspires me more and more as I learn more.” He really does get the best of both worlds with his work on both sites, which again, he is fully aware of and doesn’t take for granted. When I spoke to Bob about the benefits of
Ryan’s involvement, he told me; “At the training ground you can express yourself more than you can do here at Goodison, because you are in a controlled environment. Here, there is a specific way you can do the pitch and that’s it. Saying that, there are benefits to Ryan’s increased involvement at the stadium. He is getting more involved in the match prep and the official side of it, and dealing with referees and the delegation is beneficial to his progress as a groundsman at a Premier League stadium.” Presentation and the cosmetics of the
match pitch is a huge focus for Bob and the team. Ryan says; “It’s about sponsorship now. They want to be associated with a nice clean image.” Something that the team and their Desso pitch, installed a couple of years ago, are certainly doing a good job of promoting. Talking to a very animated Ryan about the
installation of the Desso pitch made it evident how exciting he found the process: “It was unbelievable, because I’ve never seen the pitch taken down to the gravel carpet and the undersoil heating. The pipes get exposed and it’s absolutely fantastic. It was a million miles away from what you see now; it was a sand dune, with people pulling pipes, gravel mixing with different soil profile, it was all over the show and you never ever thought that it would be where it is now.” Days into the project and nothing seemed
to be getting anywhere; “we were coming in at 7.00am and going home at 8.00pm and it just wasn’t getting better. It was mainly finicky work, because the bulk of it was done with machines.”
The undersoil heating bevels up at the end of the pitch and that all had to come up by hand, with Ryan and the team digging around and putting the pipes lower so it was even throughout the pitch. “You panic, but it does come together in the end. It is an absolute godsend. Desso is fantastic.” The club are also looking to get two Desso
training pitches installed at Finch Farm, so Ryan and Bob have travelled to various training grounds to see how they manage these areas. As well as the two new Desso additions, the club have just bought fifteen acres of land down a the bottom of the site, “It’s quite a rural area, mostly green belt, so we’ve done well buying land right down to Lower Lane. We will put another four or five pitches on, which are going to be solely community based. We’ve got such community backing from the club, I think it is the biggest in the Premier League. They are ahead of their game in that regard.” Ryan tells me. With fourteen pitches already, four more
will certainly add to the workload and, as Ryan tells me, “it doesn’t do it justice to just say fourteen pitches, because it’s fifty-five acres of playing area; and the environmental area is massive!” Not only do the pitches have to be kept to a high standard, but the environmental area is what takes up a lot of the team’s time, with environmental policies to follow in abundance. “Prior to coming into Everton, I just
thought it would be a matter of cutting the banks and that would be it,” Ryan says. “But you don’t understand that there’s wildlife in there and you’ve got policies you’ve got to actually follow, which is a massive, massive thing. We’ve got different habitats and great crested newts and all that.” The ground is not far from the Mersey
estuary too, so they have a lot of estuary birds paying a visit. Different birds entirely cause a stir at the
match pitch, and Bob has earned the nickname “Catch the Pigeon” as a result of
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