Finding the Right Pitch - by Jane Cable

I can hear a certain section of the membership muttering it now… “This £40m ground development is all very well, but what about the pitch?” Fear not though Hampshire Members – since the last day of home play on the 13th September, the pitch has been far from neglected. In fact, if you were at The Rose Bowl on 17th September, you would have witnessed a great deal of activity on the square as five inches of earth was removed from the middle two strips in preparation for relaying.

As Head Groundsman Nigel Gray explained to me, the planning actually began six months before, when the contractor had to be booked. “It’s a time of year when everyone wants to start work on their pitches – we wanted to make sure we had the best man for the job, so we had to get in early.” The two middle strips are being re-laid in a manner similar to the existing ECB designed pitch, so another job which had to be done early was analysing the top soil and adjusting the mix required for any slight changes the ground staff wanted to make. This is done under laboratory conditions, using either water or wind tunnel separation of the soil particles or – it all sounds highly technical, as indeed, a groundsman’s job increasingly is.

The analysis may have been completed in a lab, but the new topsoil arrived in industrial quantities – three lorry loads, in fact. Slightly more soil was put in than was taken out, because the level of the two strips has been slightly raised. This means that Hampshire has in fact lost four pitches for next year as the new one had to be feathered in, but as there are sixteen more available this shouldn’t prove too much of a worry. However during the third week in September, the whole square looked uncomfortably like a building site.

Gazing out across The Rose Bowl now, the grass is growing green and lush and it is literally impossible to see where the new pitches have been laid. The grass is in fact a little too green for Nigel’s liking – he would have preferred to have given it a trim before now, but the ground is just too wet.

So once the grass is cut, is that the winter work over for Nigel and his team? Don’t you believe it… there’s plenty more to be done throughout the winter. So much, in fact, I feel a whole new article coming on – watch this space!