Earning his Spurs - Pitchcare

Fiske’s
Tale...
Scottish Premier League club, Aberdeen, battled the
worst winter in thirty years, with snow falls of more
than a foot, and weeks of sub zero temperatures.
Head Groundsman, Paul Fiske, battled to keep the
pitch playable and to renovate the damaged turf in its
wake, reports Jane Carley
Eastern Scotland was one of the worst
affected parts of the country during
this winter’s big freeze, yet Aberdeen
Football Club lost just one fixture - and
that was due to police closing the icy
roads around the Pittodrie Stadium rather
than the condition of the pitch, which
Head Groundsman, Paul Fiske, reports
was fully playable that January night.
But, the severe weather, and the
demands placed by the team training on
the club’s only heated pitch, inevitably
took its toll.
The pitch at Pittodrie was
reconstructed five years ago, after a half a
season’s ground sharing with Inverness
Caledonian Thistle doubled the wear on
the 100 year-old facility. Contractors,
Greentech of Stirling, took the surface
down 16in, relevelled and installed a
drainage system with 10m laterals. Then
8in of sand and 8in of rootzone was used
to construct the pitch, with the work
finishing just six weeks before the first
game.
From frequently losing games to
waterlogging, the new pitch represented a
dramatic improvement, until the most
severe winter for thirty years struck.
Paul, who joined Aberdeen Football
Club fourteen years ago from a
greenkeeper’s job at Moray Golf Club,
Lossiemouth, explains: “The first snow
fell on 16th December, but we had to
prepare the pitch for one match and four
training sessions in fourteen days, and
kept the undersoil heating on for twentytwo
days.”
In January the snow lay for three weeks
and, from the middle to the end of the
month, temperatures averaged minus
10 O C. In total, Aberdeen endured eight
weeks of snow, yet Paul managed to
produce playing conditions for four
training sessions and four matches in one
three week period.
“When the team were training for the
Scottish Cup match on Friday 8th
January, the temperature was minus 11 O C
at ten o’clock in the morning,” Paul
recalls. “The pitch was so white that you
could not see the lines yet, due to the
heating, it was soft enough to train on.
Afterwards, we brushed the surface and
put the covers back on ready for the next
day’s game with Heart of Midlothian. On
Sunday, the team trained again and,
although there was grass coverage, you
could see that the sward had gone.”
The pattern was repeated three weeks
later. Paul had to clear the stadium itself,
snow ploughing and gritting as well as
preparing the pitch for the game with
Motherwell on 30th January, and a fixture
with Falkirk on 2nd February was
followed by two days’ training in sub zero
temperatures, once again giving the grass
a battering.