Winter Sports - Football
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Even the seed that we’d put down in February started to emerge with a vengeance, better late than never, I suppose - with just one away league game to go!
The pitch was cut shorter for corporate games
Fortunately, the results for the teams below Shrewsbury had gone our way the week before and the team knew they were safe for another season in this league. We now had another two weeks of local League Cup Finals, Football in the Community, Shropshire Schools and corporate matches to contend with. We averaged two games a day during those three weeks, so we cut the pitch every morning and marked out anything that was required. All these games are part and parcel of the fabric of a football club at this level. What we did do, once the 1st team had finished, was reduce the height of cut to 18mm over a few days and the pitch looked like a Wilton carpet. We knew spring was late coming because
we didn’t see any proliferation of poa seed heads until 4th May. So that was that, our first full season in
charge of the Greenhous Meadow surface, originally constructed with Loksand, by Kestrel. The pitch had its issues, which were overcome by analysing the profile and understanding what the plant and rootzone required.
Regular aeration kept the surface free Pitch profile on 5th April
draining, despite the wettest winter on record, and a balanced programme of nutrition maintained the health and vigour of the grass. The work that was undertaken was suitable for this pitch, being sand based and
may well need to be increased or decreased on other soil types. Up to the end of the season, the pitch
entertained forty-four matches, twenty-two training sessions and two helicopter landings. After the final league game, there were a further twenty-six games on the surface. When all the nutrition applied over the
season was added up, it was interesting to see that nitrogen input for this type of construction was quite a bit lower than I thought it would be. Sand constructions tend to hold phosphate
well, and most of the year we applied very little to the ground. We did apply high amounts of potassium but, since it’s pretty mobile in the soil, this wasn't surprising. The level of sulphur may be regarded as quite high, but a necessary requirement again. The micronutrients were kept ticking over
and reasonable amounts of calcium and magnesium applied as well. The costs outlined in the summary are
based on an ex-works full retail price. Clearly, anyone looking for a full nutritional programme for the season would be able to negotiate a much better rate. Having said that, and to put this in to perspective, the cost is probably a League One first team player’s wages for a month. Our total grass area is just short of 10,000m2
(1 Ha), so a
more standard grass area around 8,000m2 would also decrease the overall nutrition cost.
These costs include all pesticides (herbicides/fungicides), biostimulants, grass seed and Biomass Sugar as well. The costs do not include application time, fine if done in- house, but further cost to be included if contracted out. I struggle to understand why some
groundsmen are still not getting the support from their chairmen when the maintenance cost is such a small fraction of the overall budget of a stadium. Our final cut was prior to renovation,
which took place on the 19th May, eight days earlier than last season. The initial fertility
84 I PC JUNE/JULY 2016
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