FOOTBALL


I must stick to my guns this time and, as our grass naturally starts to thin out, the players won’t find the pitch a problem going into the winter. By the end of October, we will probably raise the height of cut back up to around 28mm anyway to help protect the grass going into winter


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By the time the first game was upon us, the quality of the pitch was getting to where we wanted it to be and it played equally well on the opening day of the season. It’s always difficult at this time of the year


to keep the pitch wet on top, and despite topping up the water throughout the morning and then giving the pitch a further ten minutes water through the middle after the warm ups, the surface dries up after the first fifteen minutes. At half time, we watered again through the middle, but the same happened again in the second half and it prompted the usual complaints that the pitch was too dry.


As we moved through August, the weather did start to break, we had recorded just 19mm of rain in the previous ten weeks, so the relief when we finally got some prolonged precipitation was very welcome. We managed to get the training ground vertidrained towards the end of August, which improved the levels no end; with the ability to also get some granular 12:0:9 fertiliser on as well, the turfed and seeded areas were growing in well and, by the time


we started September, everything was looking much better.


As the pitches started to mature and thicken nicely, we were told that the grass length was too long. I have always tried to maintain our height of cut at around 24mm given the issues we’d had in the build- up/start to the season we cut at 26mm. To accommodate


Root mass coming on nicely for September


management, we dropped this to 25mm in mid-September, but were told it was still too long. I rang around a few other groundsmen to gauge what they were doing, and the range was mostly around 26mm, though one was cutting at 23mm. The latter has lighting rigs and is much further south than we are but, even so, the difference in height was no more than the width of a ten pence piece. My argument to management is the confusion between height of cut and thickness of sward, but this appears to have fallen on deaf ears as well.


The previous management team had


wanted the grass shorter last season and we did keep it shorter for longer than we’d wanted to, and I’m certain this was one of the reasons why our grass died back so quickly in January. I must stick to my guns this time and, as our grass naturally starts to thin out, the players won’t find the pitch a problem going into the winter. By the end of October, we will probably raise the height of cut back up to around 28mm anyway to help protect the grass going into winter. Given what we’ve had to put up with already this year, I’m hoping that this winter is a little fairer on us, but then again…


Pitch maturing in September 88 PC October/November 2018


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