The Pink Report

The Turfectionist

On the sliding scale of mind-numbing chores, rolling a cricket pitch is up there with doing the vacuuming. Important, yes. Must be done, yes. Gets results. But not exactly cerebrally stimulating.

The motorised roller inches its way to one end of the block, slow as a snail - and we’re talking a morbidly obese snail going uphill, backwards, with a caravan hitched up. Hit reverse. Inch back to the other end. Into forward. Inch. Reverse. Inch. And so on. For a whole hour.

That was the picture on Friday in the lonely eye of Cobham Oval. Simon Harvey was sitting atop his motorised roller laughing his head off in the noonday sun. No, he hadn’t gone completely doolally with the heat and mindless drudgery. Some accidental comedienne had simply yelled to him, over the endless grumble of the roller, that she hoped he got a bonus for this.

“Hahaha hahaha haha. Hahaha haha hahahahahaha!”

I guess that was my answer.

When, at the eleventh hour, it was decided to delay all round six Plunket Shield matches by four days so that the quake-affected Canterbury Wizards weren’t left out in the cold, my pick is that a few groundsmen round the country were swearing rather than laughing.

Preparing a deck is an exact science. For the best part of two weeks the groundsmen lovingly water it, roll it, play with their chemistry sets, cover it in fairy dust and perform magic rituals to bring it to the boil precisely in time for the first session of play on day one. Unfortunately these hunks of slowly dessicating clay (the pitches I mean, not the groundsmen) don’t come with pause buttons, so it wasn’t a case of just going into a holding pattern for an extra four days. Cobham’s turf manager Simon suddenly had a ripe pitch on his hands with no one to play on it - and his work cut out trying to re-prepare it and manage the uncommon situation as best he could.

The languid weather that makes kumara grow like crazy in the subtropical north is also beloved by the particular type of rye grass fungus, a disease that likes nothing better than to party on a cricket pitch. Turf managers all over the upper half of the North Island have had extra battles with it this summer thanks to the unusually warm and muggy conditions created by La Niña. But in Whangarei, it just never seems to abate. Summer swelterpools like Auckland and Hamilton typically suffer through several weeks of 95%-plus humidity; then it’s back to relatively normal summer days. Up here in the north of the north, my bad hair day just goes on and on.

So I already felt for Simon and his council-employed Recreational Services crew, even before this latest curve ball - it’s been hard yakka this summer. Then, just to really make their day, another damp front came through. It started tinkling from the sky at the end of last week, then a torrential gush that drowned out Saturday. There was no option but to leave the covers on all day and, as it turned out, it was just as well the boys weren’t playing. But it’s no help from the weather gods when you’re trying to get the sweaty compacted clay beneath the sheets to dry out to just the right degree to enable the pitch to last.

You’d think that would at least have been a cruisy day for the likes of 25-year-old Simon - a rare day off even. Oh, but no. He still popped down to the ground regularly “just to check the covers were OK”. And on Sunday, when the sun thankfully popped back out, he was down at the ground before even the sparrows had woken up to get the covers off early  “and for best results you put them back on last thing at night.” He’s been known to work 83-hour weeks when he has back-to-back home one-day pitches to prepare, too. I doubt many people, even those who play the game, really appreciate the labour of love that goes on between a groundsman and his pitch.

I reckon he needs Radio Sport on the dashboard of that roller, but he doesn’t even bop away to an iPod as crawls up and down that pitch block 10,000 times a summer - his explosion of curly hair squished under a sun-faded hat. “You get a lot of time to think about things,” he says laconically. “But you never completely switch off because you’re gauging things as you go.”

Simon’s been looking after Cobham Oval (and other local grounds in Kamo and Kensington) ever since first-class cricket returned to the north a few years back - after the whole venue had been relocated from its previous site, now occupied by The Warehouse. He’s from Dargaville originally and began his turf management apprenticeship at 18, keen to work outdoors. He also knows and loves the game from another perspective, having represented Northland in age-group cricket and played a stint of club cricket in Auckland while he was working there. He spent five years preparing strips in Auckland, which convinced him they really do have things ever so slightly easier south of Warkworth. And in 2008 he did his OE as a groundsman at Uxbridge, London - one of Middlesex’s first-class grounds.

So clearly he has a thing for teams that wear pink. Middlesex were the pink pioneers in English cricket and he recounts when they won their domestic Twenty20 title, there was a pink champagne party to celebrate. Another highlight was preparing the deck when the club hosted a tour match against South Africa.

He enjoys his cricket - which is fortuitous as he gets to watch a heck of a lot of it in between running out to tend to the pitch and markings during the breaks in play. Cobham Oval has had a full card this summer, hosting a much-praised Pakistan tour match - Whangarei’s first international men’s fixture since 1994 (hey, no pressure), as well as so many of the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights’ one-dayers and Plunket Shield matches. It’s also the home ground of the City cricket club, so even though this is ND’s last game in Whangarei for the season, that roller will be churning right till the end of March.

And, impressively, this pitch has turned out to be about as good as it would have been even if the game against the Firebirds had started as originally scheduled on Thursday. Grass cover has been a problem all summer due to the aforementioned humidity and need for disease control, so the tracks up here have tended to be roads - and this is another one. But it certainly isn’t any worse for wear, and that’s a tribute to Simon’s care and dedication.

Firebirds captain Grant Elliott was surprised the Knights chose to bowl first on it: he was going to bat first if he won the toss - and he would be the first to admit the Wellingtonians’ 227/5 yesterday was actually conservative on such a gift. Simon predicts it will turn a little as the game progresses, but not much. It gives the batsmen no excuses - and with the points table scrunching up now after the decision to give both Canterbury and Firebirds three points for their quake-abandoned round five match (it’s currently CD 26, ND 18, Canty 15, Volts 14, Welly 13, Aces 2), the Knights’ batsmen will be keenly aware of the need for a first-innings lead when it’s their turn to dig in.

Over on the far side of the park, watching from a simple fold-up chair, there’ll be no one in the ground, save the coach, with a keener interest in how the players fare than Simon, the quiet champ backstage. I reckon he needs to get his groundie accoutrements sorted, though. At Colin Maiden the turf staff fill up an inflatable paddling pool by the sightscreen to get them through the 30-degree days and at Seddon Park KJ’s man cave, rumoured to be complete with barbecue, card table and a fridge for the cold beers, is the gold standard in groundsmen’s huts. Poor old Simon just has a tent to shade him on the scorchers, and he’s so full on that he’s never even seen the boys play at Seddon, Mount Maunganui or anywhere else.

So will he at least be able to put his feet up after this game, with the Knights heading down to Hamilton for their remaining home games? Not a chance. There’s a corporate T20 the very next day, then premier club cricket on Saturday and another match on Sunday. And then there’s the small matter of rugby fields to prepare as well.

I suspect Simon and his colleagues deserve a medal. And hopefully there’ll be an inflatable paddling pool in his Christmas stocking this year.