Ground staff working hard to get pitch perfect...
AFTER an intense season of matches and some harsh winter weather, much-needed work on the Banks’s Stadium pitch gets underway on Friday.An inch will be taken off the top and a new pitch grown in a process that takes place every few years.
“The pitch will be koro’ed so that all the grass and roots are taken off, just leaving the soil underneath,” said groundsman, Paul Mason. “An inch will come off and then 260 tonnes of fibre sand will be harrowed together with the existing soil to make one consistent soil mix, which the new pitch will be grown in.
“It will then be levelled and graded back to the true surface and over-seeded with 20 bags of rye grass seed.
“This will then be looked after and fertilized every two weeks in order to get the pitch back to a good standard in readiness for the new season.
“We’re trying to achieve a blank canvass where we remove all the weaker grass and get as much rye grass into the pitch as we possibly can as this is the harder wearing grass that is more suitable to football pitches.
“This process was certainly needed this year; it’s something that we look to do every two or three years.
“It then gives us around eight weeks to get the pitch right and ready for the start of pre-season. In an ideal world we could have done with slightly longer, but we’ve done this before and if the weather is kind to us, we will be fine.
“With the football that Dean Smith likes his team to play, it is important that we get the pitch right and the ground staff will be working extremely hard in the weeks ahead to achieve that.”