Tuesday February 18th. Crawley Town are meant to be playing Tranmere Rovers in League 1. But at around 6pm, they are forced to postpone the fixtures because the referee has concerns about players’ safety in a few areas of the pitch. A similar fate befell them on Saturday at home to Carlisle, where they had to call the game off within 2 hours of kickoff.
Now, in this quite extraordinary period of bad weather, games being called off is not a surprise. The south of England has been particularly affected, but Crawley’s attempts to get games on, only to have to postpone them so close to kickoff have caused particular distress to me because the two visiting teams (Carlisle and Tranmere) are both over 150 miles from Crawley. Their supporters would’ve got to Crawley, only to be told that their several hour journey is in vain.
The Broadfield Stadium Pitch
I can sympathise with fans from Carlisle and Tranmere. On New Year’s Day, I travelled with Boston United to Histon. Albeit only 60 miles away, we were not informed about the state of Histon’s pitch despite heavy rain across the country that day. We got within 10 miles of the ground (some Boston fans and the team bus had arrived) to be told to go back- the pitch was waterlogged. I was angry- the thing was, Histon knew that Boston would bring a relatively good travelling support and this would be their highest crowd of the year, so they were desperate to get it on. What really needed to happen was for commonsense to prevail and that game get called off at about 10am, long before anyone had begun their journeys.
This experience and the sight of Crawley and other sides calling games off at such short notice made me really take a strong stance on this. Whilst postponements will happen- it is simply impossible to play football when homes are under water and whole areas have been cut off in Somerset, can football clubs do more to get games on? I feel that the answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’.
To climb the football league ladder, the club must meet set criteria, with the ground being one of the main ones. This refers to things like capacity, seats, covered capacity, first aid facilities, press facilities and more. The grass pitch must also meet certain criteria too. There are set dimension and maximum slope. The home club must provide covers for frost and appropriate form of pitch heating (be it bonfires at League 2 level or better for the higher leagues). There is no requirement for covers to be provided for rain.
So in theory, a club can just meet requirements regarding capacity and seats but have a poor pitch which floods every time there is light drizzle. The rise of smaller teams such as Crawley, Fleetwood and Stevenage to name 3 examples also points to a trend whereby bankrolled clubs can gain promotions very quickly and suddenly be playing at a level their ground is unsuitable for. They spend money on the 1st team and then improving the ground so that is just meets the requirements. They do not spend the money upgrading the pitch, because there’s no need to.
So it is about time that the Football League began to force teams to improve their pitches in my opinion. I think unless the league decided that there were exceptional circumstances such as heavy flooding, blizzards, tornadoes etc), teams should operate on a 3 strikes rule.
If you call a game off for a third time, you are deducted 3 points. Then, for each subsequent postponement, it is another 3 points deducted. Should a game be called off after the opposition has already departed, they should have to pay the visiting team’s and supporters’ travel costs and provide free entry for those visiting fans.
Every year we get situations where teams have to play, say, 10 games in a month at the end of the season because of earlier postponements. By tightening the rules up, and also by playing relatively local fixtures in midweek during the early months of the season (before the weather tends to turn), it is possible to avoid the mad rush of games Crawley will face once their pitch recovers.
Whilst it would be impossible to ask clubs at the lowest levels of the pyramid to spend obscene amounts of money on their pitch, I do think once you get to a certain level, the pitch requirements get toughened up. The FA has made commitments to spend more money on the facilities at grass roots level- could they not aid some of the more financially troubled clubs out with even a cover for areas of their pitch? With the money involved at the top, it would be a crying shame if a relatively minuscule amount wasn’t filtered through to help these smaller clubs make changes which will benefit them for years.
I don’t want to be seen as a modern footballer who thinks the game should be played on a carpet. Nor do I want to be seen as a snob who is seen as picking on clubs currently being run better than my own. I just want football played on an acceptable standard of pitch and I don’t want fans being short-changed because of clubs who can’t sort get their act together and prepare an acceptable pitch. You get thrown out of the league if your ground is sub standard. Why is the pitch any different?
Thanks for reading,
Josh
Under The Floodlights 