FOOTBALL
St Blazey AFC Blazing a trail
The small town of St Blazey lies on the south coast of Cornwall, just a mile or so inland from the popular Par Sands. This is grockle country ‘par’ excellence. The town’s football club competes in the South West Peninsula League Premier Division West and is considered to be among the most successful clubs in Cornwall. Lee Williams met with Paul Bowden, the club’s volunteer groundsman, amongst other things!
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t Blazey AFC was formed in 1896 as a junior side, attaining senior status in 1910. Their home ground is Blaise Park, a 3,500-capacity stadium which opened in 1906.
The ground was built on reclaimed land from the nearby estuary in the town. During the First World War, the pitch was dug up and the underlying sand used to fill sandbags. Paul Bowden is not only the club’s groundsman but also Vice Chairman. He dedicates as many hours as he can to the pitch around his full-time job as the manager at the local Co-op. He has been attending first-team football matches at St Blazey since 1996 but is also a keen supporter of Plymouth Argyle FC where he is a season ticket holder.
Three years ago, the areas around Blaise Park required a little TLC, so he decided to give the club a hand. “I started off by helping out with general tasks like weeding, strimming and cutting the grass banks. The club, unfortunately, found itself having to make the groundsman redundant due to a lack of income, so I found myself starting to do bits on the pitch and, you know what it is like, once you have made one part of the pitch look good, it leads you to want all of the pitch to look great. It has moved on from there really and I’m now the groundsman on a volunteer basis.”
When I visited Paul, he was on annual leave for a week and he was using all that time to get the pitch ready for friendlies which were scheduled to kick off
in a few weeks. Assisting him was his dad Stuart Bowden.
How do you split your time between work and volunteering at the club? “It is basically a matter of fitting it in whenever possible. This time of year, with the light evenings, it’s ideal as I can get down for around 6.30pm and still have a few hours light to work with. I generally have a Thursday or a Saturday off, so it can be a Thursday morning down here and then a Saturday morning preparing the pitch for a game. I intend to spend the rest of this week getting the grass cut down and marked up ready for the friendlies at the beginning of August. I have another week off in a couple of weeks’ time. I am fortunate to get a decent number of holidays working for the Co-op, so I can use a bit of that time
PC August/September 2020
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