The Pink Report

All Weather Hero

Cricket groundsmen are men’s men, and I’m not just talking about the barbecue and cold beers you might spy in the groundsman’s nook at Seddon Park.

Karl Johnson, whose official title is Turf Manager, Waikato Stadium and Seddon Park, and whose ubiquitous informal title is KJ, has been in charge of preparing the playing surfaces for all Hamilton’s domestic and international cricket matches and rugby fixtures since 2003. Even if KJ were responsible only for looking after cricket, you’d be impressed by the hours he and his team rack up each day as a test match draws near.

Because the pitch has to last for five days, the gist of it is they start by spending a lot of time getting extra moisture deep into the block so that it doesn’t dry out too quickly, then start on the relentless rolling to get it nice and hard. The high quality Waikari clay base, imported all the way from Canterbury, holds water well, but takes a lot extra sweat in the looking after. Spend some time with the ground team and you soon appreciate that despite all the sciencey technology involved that give them fancy on-the-spot readings, there’s still an art to it that comes only from experience. Compounding things in the past week has been a spell of extremely hot weather: that has meant constant monitoring of the readings to make sure the Waikari clay substrate wasn’t drying out too fast.

KJ was up at 6.45am this morning as usual, to accommodate the 10-hour working day he repeats for 10 days straight heading into a test match. Well, normally it’s 10 days. Because of the Twenty20 International played in Hamilton on December 28, he’s only had a nine-day window this time around to get Seddon Park ready for its biggest match of the season, the first test. So it’s been all hands to the pump, even more furious than usual. All of his turf team worked right through the New Year’s break. The dumb grass doesn’t know it’s a public holiday, apparently.

Roll in the information that KJ and wife Rachel have a 10-week-old boy at home - their first baby, and you’d let him off for being a wee bit blinky-eyed of a morning. But that’s not really enough of a challenge for KJ, so to make it interesting he threw in a manic return trip to India two weeks ago, to Pune where he’s been sought out as a pitch block and outfield consultant for the 65,000-seat stadium that’s being constructed from scratch for new IPL team the Sahara Pune Warriors. He spent two days in a plane getting there, two days on the ground in India, then turned around for another two day plane trek back to New Zealand.

Tongue in cheek, I asked him if he was back to work the next day at Hamilton. “Nah, I was straight back to work the day I got back from India,” he replied - and he wasn’t kidding. They had their last Hamilton HRV Cup game that evening, against the Firebirds. “I arrived at the ground at 4pm to see the ground under water from a rainy day and my team doing a fantastic job, as usual, to enable the game to go ahead - just a wee bit later than planned.”

New Year’s Day he was pretty knackered, too. That’s because for the past 12 years KJ has been moonlighting as a volunteer firefighter (told you they were men’s men). He spent his New Year’s Eve fighting a house fire in Kawhia, on the coast south of Raglan.

On call 24/7, the pager also went off one afternoon in April 2008 when he was called out to the Icepak coolstore fire in Tamahere. KJ was one of the early firefighters on the scene of the huge blaze in which Fire Service colleague Derek Lovell was killed and seven more injured by an explosion. He talks of the New Zealand Fire Service as a brotherhood, a close-knit family, describing the tough aftermath. “But it’s very cool to see that the other guys who were injured are all doing really well and are back into doing what they love, back out there to serve their community. I love the Fire Service, being able to assist where I can and put something back into my community. I really enjoy it.”

What KJ doesn’t enjoy nearly so much is the fireman’s great friend, torrential rain. Wet weather is a groundsman’s nightmare because it’s party time for diseases that affect the turf: fungi and moulds on both the outfield and pitch block. It means extra-early starts and a lot of extra work for his entire six-person team.

This is the first La Niña summer he’s experienced in the steamy north since moving up from Lincoln in 2003, where he’d been New Zealand Cricket’s turf manager at the High Performance Centre - it hosted an under-19 world cup and women’s world cup during his tenure. It would be fair to say he’s not too keen on weather’s wild child. First came the drought and all the extra watering. Then, just as the cricket season got going (of course), it bucketed down in the Waikato.

A nifty sand slit carpet drainage system that was installed under the Seddon Park outfield in 2005 (that means lateral drains spaced 10 metres apart, with 13 kilometres of sand slits in between, running at a 45 degree angle over the lateral drains) has come into its own with all the damp stuff. As testament to just how important this nitty gritty stuff is, think back to the day of the BLACKCAPS’  T20i against Pakistan. The White Ferns, scheduled to play Australia as the curtainraiser that afternoon, had their game called off: it was hosing down, the covers clamped tight. Yet, much to the amazement of everyone except the groundstaff, the BLACKCAPS game not only went ahead that evening, but did so in time to allow the full 20 overs per innings.

“If it does bucket down, the water can still get away pretty quick,” says KJ, “so we were able to get the ground up and ready to start at 7pm. It was still a big effort to have it up and going for a start at that time, a pretty tough day for my boys. We were all pretty sore at the end of it. We’d started at 7.30am, six of us working non-stop - no one had a break through to the start of the game at 7pm. My wife dropped off some muffins which were a bit of a saviour for us to get through! Then by the time we tidy up after the match, it’s 11pm before we get out of here, so it’s a pretty long day.”

Come February and the start of the Super 15 and both Hamilton’s sporty venues will be at full noise. Besides the first test, Seddon Park is also hosting the February 3 ODI and two Plunket Shield matches in March, while the Chiefs have two home matches coming up around the same time. It’s a lot of pressure and KJ and the team will doubtless be knackered again, but they take a lot of pride in their work. That’s why they go to the extra trouble of mowing tartan rug patterns into the grass for one-day internationals - because the television broadcast showcases Hamilton and New Zealand all round the world. They tone it down for test matches “because tests are all about tradition”, KJ says. Nice touch.

What I really want to know is whether KJ has lawns at home, and if he does, whether they have neat, criss-crossed stripes. He laughs hard at that one. “You know what a builder’s house looks like, and a mechanic’s car! My lawns are OK, but I don’t get to spend as much time at home as I’d like to look after the vege garden and the lawns. I’m very fortunate to have a very loving wife who looks after those things. But I can say this is my backyard here at Seddon Park, so if you want a bit of backyard cricket, come see me down here!”

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From fighting fires to picking over The Ashes: two of our pink friends, Brad Hodge and David Hussey, received an honourable mention in a no-nonsense cricket opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald this week. For the assessment of how the Australian cricket team has contrived to lose both The Ashes and, more significantly, its once-impregnable mana over the past few years, check it out at http://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/how-a-perfect-storm-formed-over-scg-20110101-19ch1.html - well worth a read.

Maybe the rot really started when we squashed them in the Chappell-Hadlees a few years ago... which makes me think, this wouldn’t be a bad time to be going one-on-one with Australia right now; what a pity it’s the first summer in seven seasons that we haven’t had a Chappell-Hadlee Trophy series contested.

One more thought for the day. Superstitious sorts amongst our Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights, supporters and crew will be glad the team is playing the Stags in Palmerston North on January 12, not a day earlier. I’m sure playing a match on 11/1/11 would have been a talking point and I’d like to propose matches on 1/11/11 and 11/11/11 to kick off next season. Everyone would be up for that, wouldn’t they?