CRICKET
After serious flooding at Blackfinch New Road, Worcestershire CCC’s head groundsman Tim Packwood faced new challenges as he prepared for the new season with a shrinking team and a set of Covid protocols. Jane Carley met up with him as play finally got underway again
hey say that a week is a long time in politics, but three months is a lot longer to be looking at an eerily quiet cricket pitch, unsure of when play will begin again. This is the dilemma that has faced cricket groundsmen up and down the country who, as sport has gradually got up and running again, find themselves in a whole new world of social distancing, ‘bubbles’ and temperature checks. When we last spoke to Tim Packwood at
T
Worcestershire County Cricket Club back in March, Britain was on the brink of lockdown, but a bigger concern was how to prepare for the new season - if it happened - with a ground which had only just emerged from its worst flood for twelve years. Sited on the flood plain next to the River Severn, the club is used to flooding at its Blackfinch New Road ground, but autumn 2019’s renovations had been obliterated by an earlier-than-expected deluge, and the pressure was on to get the pitch into shape for whatever sport was to come. “Whilst we have small machinery for individual wickets, we use contractors for the square. Carrick Sports were lined up to come in the Monday after lockdown, but were forced to cease operations by the Covid regulations,” explains Tim. It was time for Plan B - tractor mounted scarifiers were loaned by Warwickshire County Cricket Club and Worcester Royal Grammar School and a disc seeder from Kings School in Worcester and the work carried out by Tim and his team. “The next challenge was how to transport them to us, but we were helped out by Richard Ding of R&D Plant who look after our own machinery. The company also provides our winter storage, so we had machines that we needed to get back from its premises too.”
Impressively, the renovations - scarification, seeding, fertiliser and topdressing - were completed by 31st March. “We generally only use a light topdressing to get into the scarification lines and cover seed, but the levels had been lost in some places due to being underwater for so long, so this also needed addressing. With little idea how much, if any, cricket would be
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