FOOTBALL
SGL MU50 lighting rig
We try and keep our
standards as professional as possible; that’s important to us. We are now renowned for having a really good pitch. Even though we are at non-league level, the
pressure is on to keep the pitch as good as possible
“knocking on a bit”. At this time, Barry was in the room which gave us all a laugh, but he is a great help to Nick when it comes to the little jobs. He also has his Deputy from the golf club, Justin Pickering, who works Monday-Friday which, in the summer, means they can both be at the ground for 2.00pm, which enables them to get around 3-4 hours work in. In the winter, they manage to get about 1-2 hours in with the nights drawing in, making maintaining the pitch more difficult. Nick feels lucky that, when it comes to budgets and investment in the playing surface, the club has backed him from day one. He doesn’t really have a budget. It’s a matter of working to what they need at the time. The club trust that Nick will not go over the top and only spend what he feels he needs to, this gives him the freedom to get what he needs when he needs it. The original construction of the Tameside Stadium pitch was poor. When Nick first went into the club there was very
little information available about pitch construction or specifications. This meant that at the end of the season he would have to carry out investigations himself, to get a better understanding of the make-up of the pitch and what he had to deal with. “It was a case of getting a spade out and having a dig around to see what we were working with, as the water certainly was getting away. It appeared to be 12½ inches of poor soil - if you could class it as soil! Below that was a blinding layer of stone, but it reminded me of blue slate, and below that was what you would class as a membrane over broken brick; the membrane reminded me of being like an onion bag; that was the kind of quality.” Nick believes the stone above the membrane is just there to stop the soil going onto the membrane and blocking it up. After his initial assessment, it was decided that they would have to address the drainage issues going forward if they were to start getting the improvements they required to the surface.
Hunter irrigation system 82 PC December/January 2019
Nick agreed a plan of drainage work to be carried out before the start of the coming season. “We decided to go with excavated sand slits, using a whizz wheel down to the membrane, just tickling into that stone, as we could cover more area with the money available at the time. The excavated sand slits are at one metre centres enabling us to cover more area initially, making it drain better to begin with, this tied the surface into the membrane.” If they were to put main drains in first, which would be the ideal scenario, they may have only got four or five in a year with the funds available. Nick goes on to tell me that they did do it odd ways about though. He would have liked to put primary drains in first and then gone with the secondary. Since this initial work, the club have invested heavily in their drainage and now have main drains running lengthways down the pitch at four metre centres which are 150mm wide, with a 100mm perforated land drain in the bottom, 2-6mm gravel over the top and a 4-inch sand cap, running into a main drain behind the goal. They are now halfway
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