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RUGBY UNION Career challenges ...


I moved from Rushden and Diamonds to Tottenham Hotspur in 2003. It was a steep learning curve and really opened my eyes to how different it is to maintain and grow grass in a large, inhospitable stadium. It took me some time to adapt and re-assess the whole “growing grass thing”.


Being robbed of natural resources you take for granted, and the impact that has on your job is, at times, monumental and also deeply frustrating. This, of course, was before the wonders of grow lights, so White Hart Lane was, for its size, a notoriously shaded pitch. The south goal line would only see maybe three hours of sun in total for the year. This would be on the longest day before the shade line made its steady march back towards the north.


Jim’s adaptation from football to rugby. Knowing not to stress about damage and appreciate the time between fixtures has been important, as has getting to grips with intense pitch usage.


“Some periods I might have five or six


weeks when I’ve got no fixture but then, unfortunately, when they do have a fixture here, it tends to be quite an intense time,” Jim explained. “With Barbarians in November, we probably had seven hours’


worth of rugby physically on the pitch. We had three to three and a half hours of 800 kids playing mini-tournaments and then we had the warm ups and the actual game itself in the afternoon. Whereas I’m used to football, where it might be every other week, or you might have two games in the space of ten days, but it would be for two hours and then two hours. Again, balance-wise over the annual season usage will probably be quite similar, but I’ll have very quiet periods and


We would have fifty games a season at Rushden and Diamonds and it wouldn’t have a huge effect on pitch performance or certainly nothing out of the ordinary. At White Hart Lane, it was a different story, maybe half that amount of fixtures would be making us sweat and we would be fighting it to the end. We were aiming for quality and consistency and we did manage that eventually. Technology and products moved along enough for it to be implemented and this, again, needed to have a degree of learning to achieve what we wanted.


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