- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
As England prepare for a key European Championship qualification match against Slovenia on Saturday, manager Roy Hodgson has called the quality of the surface of the Wembley pitch into question.
He has also criticised the scheduling of an NFL match just six day before his team are due to play.
The managing director of Wembley, Roger Maslin, admitted that the pitch “will not be of the highest standard” when the two teams do battle on Saturday, a week after the Jacksonville Jaguars played the Dallas Cowboys in the last of this season’s three NFL games at Wembley.
Maslin blames a summer pitch renovation – where too much topsoil was added – as the principle reason for the grass visibly cutting up and marking during the NFL game.
The Wembley pitch has come in for criticism after a non-football event before, after the very first NFL International Series game in 2007 when Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants clashed in atrocious weather conditions.
The standard of the pitch was heavily criticised prior to England’s 3-2 defeat to Croatia in a vital European 2008 qualifier, a result which contributed towards England’s failure to qualify for the tournament. That match took place three weeks after the NFL, and the pitch was still in an awful condition after a month of persistent heavy rain.
Although this match was later remembered for England coach Steve McClaren being dubbed ‘the wally with the brolly’, it was just one of a number of embarrassing pitch issues that the new Wembley has faced.
Since the new Wembley was completed in 2007, numerous managers and players have criticised the pitch – Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger described it as “laughable” and a “disaster” after an FA Cup semi-final defeat.
The failure of the pitch to sufficiently ‘bed in’ is in part due to the large number of events that Wembley hosts, ranging from football, rugby union and league, boxing and concerts. There have been 50 live music events since the stadium reopened – and even twice hosting a motor sports ‘Race of Champions’ spectacle. But this frequent leasing of the stadium is essential for the FA to pay off the £798 million (AU$1.46 billion) construction bill.
Experts have said that the Wembley pitch, historically the envy of every groundsman in the country – if not the world – would never reach these heights again due to the sheer number of different events taking place on the turf each season.
The pitch was relaid 10 times in the first three years after the stadium reopened in 2007, and the same experts suggest that constantly relaying the grass – at an estimated cost of about £100,000 (AU$185,000) is the only way to ensure a pristine playing surface at modern, multipurpose stadiums.
Australian football is also impacted by multi-use stadiums. When the Socceroos played Jordan at Docklands in a 2014 World Cup qualifier, just three days after an AFL game, then captain Lucas Neill lamented the fact that football in Australia would always have to compete with AFL and the rugby codes, resulting in a less-than-ideal playing surface.
While a less than perfectly smooth surface is generally acceptable for both rugby codes and AFL, it is not the best for football. After scrubbing out the vast number of promotional and pitch markings, the pitch can end up looking, and playing very poorly.
There are plenty of examples of players and managers voicing concerns over the standard of playing surfaces, but there is some evidence to suggest that Australian stadiums are upping their game.
The PFA (Professional Footballers Australia) introduced a ‘Pitch Rating System’ in 2009-2010 which attempted to quantify the quality of A-League pitches and possibly address the problems some venues were having in preparing satisfactory pitches early in the A-Leagues existence.
In the four seasons I could locate records for, Brisbane’s Lang Park was voted best for the first two years, and Melbourne’s AAMI Park was voted the best pitch the following two seasons. Interestingly, this suggests the multi-sport usage of stadiums didn’t seem to affect the perceived quality of the pitch.
Other Roarers will have a better idea than me, but from my experience, apart from the SFS – which often takes on the unfortunate appearance of a ploughed field – Newcastle’s Hunter Stadium and the occasionally patchy Suncorp Stadium, the quality of pitches used in Australian football appears to be pretty high, particularly bearing in mind the local football team isn’t the primary tenant.
But this is scant consolation for Wembley’s primary tenants.
Roy Hodgson will be hoping that the Wembley groundskeeping team manage to make the field as playable as possible for his team, as they hope to avoid slipping up in what will be captain Wayne Rooney’s 100th appearance for England.
Perhaps when the Wembley debt is finally paid off, the ground can once more live up to its name and again be the envy of football pitches around the world.
Are you the ultimate team manager? Pick your own superstar team and go head to head with other football fans for glory and cash prizes on Draftstars. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.