The night I slept with Jamie Hoyland
A mid-80s romp with our writer across the pitches of England – all in the name of research
For four years in the mid-1980s, I worked for an establishment that specialised in research into and the maintenance of sports pitches and surfaces, both of natural grass and the then-relatively-new artificial turf. It was my first proper job, straight out of University. I was working on a project funded by the Sports Council and, naturally, football pitches were my main area of interest. The project involved going to pitches of all standards (from Wembley to local parks) all over the country to do tests on the grass – seeing how high the ball bounced and how fast and far it rolled, measuring how much grip a player could get from the turf, the ‘evenness’ of the surface and various other ‘player related’ measurements.
We needed a method of interpreting the results (this was science after all – sorry if it’s boring you), so the Sports Council organised a squad of professional players. Under the guidance of an FA coach called George Smith, who had recently returned from working in Saudi Arabia, the squad played football and did training drills on the pitches, and then filled in a questionnaire concerning the overall quality of the various surfaces they’d been on. Was it too hard, or too soft? Was it too bumpy? Was the bounce of the ball even? Could you get enough grip on the surface? We then tried to correlate their answers with our measurements, making use of a telephone connection to the mainframe computer at Bradford University via a new-fangled device called a modem. The proper internet was still a decade away.
Jumping to the end of the project for a moment, the outcome was a rather dry academic 68-page document titled Standards Of Playing Quality For Natural Turf, by G. Holmes and M.J. Bell, published in November 1987 by the Sports Council and the Sports Turf Research Institute. The national media had previously got wind of our research: we were interviewed by BBC Radio Four and had no less a figure than Sir Trevor Brooking commenting on what we were doing. We were also featured in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, the Yorkshire Post, and even the Guardian and Times. You can watch a young me in action here:
Our contact on the Sports Council made all the arrangements with football clubs, asking for their permission to ‘borrow’ both their players and their grounds for a day. The Sports Council also purchased a full set of Umbro kit (red shirts, white shorts, red socks) for the players to wear if they hadn’t brought their own gear. Guess who had to wash it afterwards? At least I was paid £5 each time. Plus, at the conclusion of the project I somehow managed to secure some of this kit, which for many years afterwards was put to good use by my Sunday League team.
The players we had with us for the sessions were mainly youngsters, including a few who went on to play league football in the late 1980s, such as Geoff Lomax, right back for Manchester City and Carlisle United; Steve Perks, goalkeeper at Shrewsbury Town; Tranmere Rovers goalkeeper Nigel Adkins (whatever happened to him?); Ray Woods, a winger with Tranmere Rovers and Coventry City; and Alex Jones, centre half for Oldham Athletic. There were also a couple of more experienced pros from Preston North End, Joe Hinnigan and Peter Houghton. Two more of the players managed to make quite a name for themselves in later years – and both have Blades connections.
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