SO SOLID CREWE!
delight in digging up the pitch for place kicks and marking out their territories. Even our goalie does it. At the end of the season I’m thinking of putting a sign on the offending area saying ‘Some bird brain did this’ but, I bet, not even that would stop them. Even with the FA directives they still do it, but then, there’s nobody prepared to tell them to move on.” So, John has devised his own methods. “I use various techniques to control the players, such as roping off goalmouths or, if they are doing warm downs, I’ll put the sprinklers on. That soon gets rid of them!” he says with a huge grin on his face. “I bet there wasn’t a groundsman in the land that wasn’t running around his living room whooping for joy when that goalkeeper from Tottenham missed Gary Neville’s back pass that hit a mound he had made and bobbled over him into the goal. Players need to understand the effort that goes into preparing a quality surface for them to play on.”
“In the end,” he says “it comes down
to trying to educate both players and managers about the needs of the pitch.” John is responsible for overseeing the work at both the training ground and stadium. The club employ two other groundstaff, Andy Walley, who works mainly at the training ground, and Andy Warham, John’s assistant at Gresty Road. The training ground provides several grass pitches and two artificial 3G playing facilities, one indoor that measures 60m x 40m and one outdoors, 100m x 66m.
John generally spends the mornings at the training ground and returns to help Andy on the stadium pitch in the afternoons.
Machinery is pretty standard, with a 42 inch Allett Regal and a 36 inch Allett, bought with some of the proceeds from the sale of David Platt, used on the stadium pitch along with a ride on Honda rotary for mowing the perimeter areas and cleaning up debris. All the pitches at the training ground
are cut daily using a triple deck rotary Husqvarna mower.
Last year, John began applying Primo Maxx at the training ground to improve the density of the sward and to reduce cutting frequencies. It was applied to the U18’s and the first team pitches. “I went to see a demo of it at Haydock Park” says John. “I saw the video of Arsenal’s training pitches and I thought, something’s not right here. They don’t work any harder on their pitches than I do on mine yet they look ten times better. Well, it turns out it’s all down to Primo Maxx! I did suggest to the Primo guys that they should trial these new ideas at the smaller clubs such as Bury, Shrewsbury or Crewe. All the other small clubs would be thinking ‘if Crewe can afford it, so can we’. Everyone knows that Arsenal have got Arabs flying over the ground on a daily basis throwing pound notes at the pitch! Therefore, groundsmen at smaller clubs see the product as elitist.”
However, the results have been so good that John is now applying Primo Maxx to the main stadium pitch. The stadium pitch is a Fibresand
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