Coventry pitch was damaged by music concerts at the start of the summer.Compounded by the Commonwealth games.
There are plenty on here who think they know what really happened with the two groundsmen. None of whom have repeated the judge's comments when throwing the case out of court that it was one of the most ridiculous cases of unfair dismissal that he has ever heard. The reason why Man Utd allowed the RL game on Saturday was because we are in the middle of an international break. I doubt if Man U were at home the following day in the Prem that the RL game would have taken place there. How many times do they relay the pitch at Craven Park? and I can never recall the boulevard pitch being re-laid even once. The 'park' pitch I played most of my football on is the same ground that Hull FC use today as their training ground. It was one renown as one of the best football pitches in the city at the time, until the RL club started using it. Now after 100% RL use, by Fc, Sir Adam is citing the state of the playing area as one of the reasons they are now moving to the university. Also, even though it's 'not 30 years ago' and we have moved on with the technology of pitch Maintenace, like it or not, it was the Premier League who investigated our shared pitch and told the club to act because it was not up to standard.
Suspect it was one of the best park pitches in the country when most park pitches were covered in dogsshit and cat grass. Just need to watch the telly and some 90s footie vids to realise that the expected standard has significantly improved in the last few years, and rightly so. I've seen BP pitch in worse nick than I've ever seen the MKM. I've also seen both pitches look pristine. The tubbys only use it a dozen or so times a year anyway.
The Boothferry Park pitch was ruined, as I stated in an earlier post, by staging a RL international on it in the mid 80's. They heavily sanded and salted the pitch when the RL game was in danger of being called off because of a frozen pitch. This ruined the turf for several months, Look up John Cooper, the groundsman at the time and ask him for his comments. As late as the David Lloyd era, when he visited Boothferry Park for the first time, after first seeing the state of the boulevard, he abandoned his plan for City to ground share the boulevard. His comments were the pitch was better than the Centre Court at Wimbledon and good enough to play tennis on. As for the park pitches and dogshit comments, the pitch I was referring to was a privately owned one with two fulltime groundsmen looking after it and it was still ruined by playing RL on it.
I played for BP (Chemicals) Great pitches, privately owned and professional groundsmen. Football was played on one pitch and rugby League on another.
I'm pretty sure Pearson is moving them to the Uni because the club is close to going under losing hundreds of thousands a year and cannot afford to run a training site. Nothing to do with the grass. If they could get away with it they would be playing at Craven Park next season instead of incurring huge debts by staying at the MKM. Allegedly.
So salt caused the problem, not blokes running around on it shouting 'offsaaard!'. It's not the 70s anymore. I don't care either way whether they play RL at the MKM. Doesn't cause any more wear than training the first team, playing first team and reserves on it as was the case at BP.
Credit to John Cooper, but I daresay that you are referring to the post-chetham era, when the BP drainage had to be extensively refurbished at quite a cost at the time.
Who mentioned the 1970's ? The RL international was in the mid 80's. They poured so much sand on the pitch that the centre circle was raised from the rest of the pitch. City played there for 50 odd years and never had to resort to those tactics to get a game played. Because a football surface is not the same as a surface to play RL on. The only reason our current pitch can handle RL and football is because the club spend a fortune on it, and yes as much as some of you hate to hear this, the Allam's at the time, got to the root of the problem.
