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FOOTBALL


Shrewsbury Town FC


2018 ‐ a most difficult year


I’ve written a few articles about the work that we carry out at Shrewsbury Town FC over the last few years. Generally, as an industry, we all manage to cope with what’s thrown at us, a combination of usage, environment and aspect limitations and, of course, the weather.


G


iven the extremes of weather that most of us have had to endure in 2018, you can probably add to the above, criticism


received from spectators, players, managers and, indeed, the media. At the beginning of the year, I was also involved at Oldham Athletic, so the very wet December, January and February was a constant daily worry of how much rain had fallen overnight, what fixtures were coming and where were the players going to train. Oldham have no drainage at all under their training ground pitches and, with no investment spent on renovations for years, a dominant sward of poa annua. There were weeks when nobody could use the flooded pitches at all for training, either at Chapel Road or Little Wembley (OAFC training grounds).


Whilst Shrewsbury had spent some money on their training ground, as I have previously written about, the renovations of 2017 had only included some sand banding at right angles to the piped drainage. The 2017-18 season was the squads first time at the revamped ground. As we moved through the autumn of 2017, it was noticeable that


some areas were becoming softer as the water table rose and, as the precipitation became more regular, those areas became out of bounds for training. This caused some friction with the manager, who, perhaps understandably, expected that a ‘brand new’ training ground, should not have problems. Whilst I explained that the pitch improvements were work in progress and that it would require year on year remedial work to bring them up to a good level, expectations were already high and clearly unachievable with available resources. At Oldham, there


didn’t seem to be too much criticism, since the coaching staff were aware of the historic problems and underfunding. At Shrewsbury, the coaching staff were


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PC October/November 2018


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