Marshalling his troops - Pitchcare

The Fall and Rise
of Mark Perrin!
Nearly thirty years on, however,
Sainsbury’s continues to flourish, whilst
the adjacent housing that lines one side
of the ground looks as new as the day it
was erected.
In stark contrast, the stadium is tired
and played out, a good proportion of its
plastic seating suffering the effects of
disintegration by the sun’s ultraviolet
light. Financial constraints,
administration and the economic
downturn had left Selhurst Park
groundstaff with precious little money to
spend on operational essentials, such as
the end of season pitch renovation.
”I couldn’t gain sign-off for even the
smallest purchase, it was that bad,”
confesses Head Groundsman, Mark
Perrin.
Survival on a shoe-string was the
reality for Mark and his team, as was
redundancy, when he was forced to bid a
reluctant farewell to one of his staff as
administration bit hard and deep across
the whole club.
Heading up a perilously slimmed
down team of just three, forty-four year
old Mark admits there were times when
he had to consider his own future amid
talk of closure as a buyer failed to
materialise.
But, that was in the bad old dismal
days, three months ago. Despite all the
turmoil around him, as acrimony soured
the departure of the previous owner and
uncertainty hung over everyone, Mark
has continued to produce a playing
surface fit for Championship, not to say
Premiership, football in the face of fierce
adversity and against all the odds.
Starting off life in cricket, a sport he
admits is his “first love”, Mancunian
Mark’s first job was at south-west
Manchester club, Chorlton-cum-Hardy,
where he worked from 1989 to 1992.
Passionate about playing cricket since a
boy, and developing into a useful,
successful all-rounder in the Manchester
leagues while growing up, Mark was
always drawn to a career in the game,
explaining that, on leaving education, it
was a natural progression for him.
“I was always a better cricketer but
enjoyed watching football far more, so
had always considered taking a position
at a football club,” he expands. After
leaving Chorlton-cum-Hardy to seek “a
greater challenge”, he moved to a post at
Manchester Grammar School, drawn
there by “its many sports pitches and
especially its cricket square”, which he
took pleasure in maintaining until 1995
when he took his first steps into
professional football, joining Stockport
County FC as head groundsman.
“I enjoyed my time at Stockport,” he
recalls, “but, after four years there, I felt
it was time to leave. The best jobs in this
business will always be in the south-east,
so I made the move down here and was
lucky to find a very nice post at St Mary’s
College in Twickenham, where they were
looking to develop their sports pitches.”
As grounds manager, he was charged
with looking after the site’s plethora of
pitches. Yet, as the position proved to be
“more office based than I’d been used
to”, when the head groundsman vacancy
came up at Crystal Palace he leaped at
the chance and, in 2005, made the move
further south still. And, with true
northern grit, he is still there.
Since Palace fell from the Premier
League in 2004, the budget Mark has to
play with has shrunk year on year, to the
point where he and his two assistants -
Phil Down, who works at the Beckenham
training ground, and Gareth Read, who
assists him at Selhurst Park, are forced to
argue their case for every penny. “An
extra member of staff would be great, but
I don’t see it happening anytime soon,
given the recent redundancies and tight
budgets,” he states with resignation.
“We’ll just have to cope as well as we can
with the three of us.”
You sense that he has grown adept at
‘coping strategies’ in his years here but,
as the financial rot set in, other
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