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Details revealed behind Hull City's major MKM Stadium investment project
The subject of Hull City's playing surface was a big topic last season with the MKM Stadium pitch often derided and a very visible problem.
Those who watched City during the winter months will remember the dark colours and the way it would cut up, especially on Boxing Day when Jack Clarke scored a late winner for Sunderland.
The quality of the playing surface left Liam Rosenior unhappy, and saw City invest in state of the art lighting rigs from Amsterdam to try and help, until the summer months came and the pitch could be ripped up and redone at a cost of more than £1m.
That did happen, albeit in a ridiculously short period during the summer following the end of the Championship season, once it became apparent the Tigers would not be involved in a play-off campaign, before Hull FC would resume their home campaign against Leeds Rhinos on June 15.
While players, managers, fans and pundits would all pass comment on the state of the pitch, head groundsman Aaron Tong and his team of six other staff would be the one at the coalface, trying to limp through until the summer until it could be ripped up, and get it into the fine shape we've seen this term.
"It was difficult from a point of reading stuff on Twitter or anything like that or hearing a match day pundit who obviously doesn't maybe necessarily know the story, but from within the club, the support was massive." the stadium's head groundsman told Hull Live as he reflected on a challenging 12 months.
"The club have invested since in brand new lighting rigs, and I'm sure a lot of Hull Daily Mail readers will see the pink glow (coming from the MKM Stadium). The club have invested and then we've got the reconstruction in the summer and the club were very supportive. They understood that we had to change the issues. The coaching staff were all very much behind us because these pitches (at the training ground) were performing brilliantly, but it was just the stadium construction that's been failing.
"The most difficult period for us was on Boxing Day and then we had the 29th (against Blackburn Rovers), and both of those games got played in a fair bit of rain, and then we got a home tie in the FA Cup. Then you think when we get through those band of fixtures, some football clubs would be able to see the light, but we didn't because the rugby season was due to start, so the lack of recovery time we were going to get was just off the radar, so that part of the season was really difficult.
"The team did absolutely everything we could to try and recover the pitch, but, unfortunately, there were parts of the season where it was just not possible."
While most clubs throughout the country will have a whole summer to get their pitch work done in plenty of time, that's not the case at the MKM Stadium with rugby league taking over during City's close season, which only added further logistical issues to planning, and then there were one or two surprises thrown in for good measure.
"In the past when we've renovated as such, we've had some really short windows and one of my first seasons here as a groundsman at the club, we had a 16 day period from putting grass seed down and then there was a rugby match on it," Tong continued. "This year was probably the toughest, I'd say for us because we weren't just renovating the current pitch, we were actually reconstructing the full pitch, so we had a four-and-a-half week window to do that in from the end of football season.
"Usually, football clubs doing that type of work get eight to 12 weeks to do that, so we'd almost done it in a third of the time, and then there was a rugby match on it straight after that at the end of that window so it was a difficult period within the summer.
"We worked with a lot of really skilled people within the industry and one of the first real challenges was the existing drainage system that had been (installed) to our previous pitch was actually non-functional, so we had to completely change the plan that we were gonna tap into that and sort that. Then we also found another set of under-soil heating pipes which were redundant, they'd just been put in and left in.
"It took two days off their schedule, just removing those. You're always working against the clock for that first rugby fixture, I think it was the 15th of June, so we always knew we had to be basically playable by that week and that was challenging in itself, but it was also a bit of a relief from our point of view to find the previous construction had all these problems because obviously the pitch was well documented last year that it wasn't looking at its best, but it explained why, so it was nice to see that underneath, it wasn't working the way it should be."
READ MORE: Inside £1.5m MKM Stadium pitch renovations ahead of Hull City's Championship restart
You can listen to the full podcast with Aaron talking about how the ground staff try and mitigate against serious injuries, and who does more damage, football players or rugby, by downloading via the links below or at the top of this story....
