Winter Sports - Football
Jane Carley reports on a new hybrid pitch that has stood up to a hard winter of rugby and football at the Ricoh Arena for Wasps and Coventry City
T
he Ricoh Arena stands proud above the city of Coventry, between its historic centre and the M6 motorway and surrounded by bustling retail and industrial parks.
Its path to being a modern leisure palace which includes a casino, conference centre and hotel has not been without undulations. Coventry City Football Club relocated from their Highfield Road stadium, their home since 1899, to the Ricoh Area in 2005 and the ‘Sky Blues’ have been based here ever since, apart from a season at Northampton Town’s Sixfields Stadium in 2013/14. On
returning to the Ricoh Arena the following season, they won their first match 1-0 against Gillingham in front of 27,000 fans. In November 2014, Arena Coventry
Limited (ACL) accepted a purchase offer for the whole stadium facility from Wasps Holdings Ltd. A pressing challenge was that the playing
surface now needed to withstand the increased playing hours required by Coventry City FC and Wasps RFC, so pitch surface specialist GreenFields UK Ltd was approached to provide a solution. The company’s head office is in the
Netherlands, where its pitch surfacing products are more commonly supplied to independent contractors who install the pitches and may also offer initial or ongoing maintenance services. Ben Grigor, Grounds Manager for the
company explains: “The approach is different in the UK, where we design and build the
project, and have now added ongoing grounds management and maintenance services to the package.” The Ricoh Arena’s owners recognised that
the playing surface would need to offer the additional durability offered by a hybrid pitch but, with the new season looming, GreenFields installed a natural turf pitch as a temporary measure with an XtraGrass pitch planned for Summer 2015. “XtraGrass was an ideal choice for the
Ricoh as it gives the opportunity to improve standards with limited resources - there are just two groundsmen and the stadium does not have lighting rigs or germination sheets,” explains Ben. The hybrid system combines the positive
properties of natural grass, with the fibres giving the visual impact needed for the television cameras, even in the depths of winter, whilst maintaining stability and minimising divoting.
As with many modern stadia, shading is an issue
The pitch is sprayed off with glyphosate prior to renovation to control poa
PC JUNE/JUL 2016 I 89
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