Preparing the groundwork

FOUR years after he took up his post in Dublin 3, Robert Ellis still has Yorkshire in his voice.

The rangy groundsman has a busy week ahead of him — the little matter of history being made and all that — but he still has time to outline the nuts and bolts of changing the face of Croke Park.

“Preparing for an ordinary GAA game is quite easy, because obviously you’re already set up for that. For rugby the posts are different, so the GAA posts have to come down, and the rugby field’s a lot shorter as well. That and the posts are the obvious differences, but the turf itself, is left much the same as it would be for a Gaelic football game. The hurling’s slightly different because they like the grass a little shorter for that, but rugby isn’t a whole lot different to the football.”

However, sixteen men of eighteen stone each don’t tend to scrummage in a Gaelic football match — not normally, anyway. Those nervous about seeing divots the size of tabletops can relax, however: Ellis is confident the pitch can take it.

“There’ll be no major structural damage to the pitch because it’s got the plastic fibres to reinforce it.

It won’t be like the Millennium Stadium, where you see huge chunks torn out of the ground. You’re going to have damage, because obviously rugby’s a very hard game, and no matter where it’s played it’ll damage a pitch. But there won’t be any more damage than what we’d have to deal with after two games on a Sunday afternoon.

“We have a similar pitch to those in the new Arsenal stadium, Spurs’ ground, West Ham, Liverpool — but also to the pitches at Reading, Wycombe and Watford, which all have both rugby and soccer played on them, so that’s encouraging.”

The Croker pitch is 86 metres wide and 144 metres long, while a rugby field is 100 metres post to post, plus a ten-metre in-goal area behind those. At only 70 metres wide, there’s a considerable difference in the alignment of the playing areas, but the dimensions of a GAA pitch mean Ellis has plenty of room to play around with. For instance, anyone expecting to lean over and slap the hooker on the back at line-out time is in for a surprise.

“The posts will be just in front of the 20-metre line,” says Ellis. “There’s 104 metres between those, so the rugby goal will be just in front of the two lines, not on them. There isn’t a line from the GAA pitch that we’ll retain.

“The sideline will come in eight metres from where it is for GAA games, for one thing. That’s eleven metres to the carpet (the orange perimeter in front of the seating area) and then another two metres to the actual front row. It’s around 14, 15 metres from the spectator to the sideline – I’d compare it to the European stadia with their running tracks around the playing area.

“It’s not going to be like Lansdowne Road, where you have people right on top of the player taking the line-out, for instance. You’re going to be a lot further away from the play.”

Some things should make Brian O’Driscoll (if he’s playing) and company at home.

There may be a familiar look to the target Ronan O’Gara aims at.

“Lansdowne Road had a spare set of goalposts, so we’re getting those,” says Ellis. “They’re not the posts that were used there for the autumn internationals. They’re narrower than our posts and they’re slightly taller.

“Last October holes were dug as sockets for the posts, each a metre-and-a-half square and a concrete block inserted. You can’t see those because there’s six inches of turf on top of them for the GAA season, but we’ll be popping the posts into them.”

When it comes to putting down the whitewash, Ellis is an old hand at redrawing the lines.

“I’ve marked pitches for rugby league, rugby union and soccer — and now GAA — so I’ll line the pitch. I’m from Huddersfield in Yorkshire — I worked at Huddersfield Town, the old McAlpine Stadium, for twelve years, so we had soccer and rugby league, while for the 1999 Rugby World Cup we had England’s group games and a quarter-final. So I’m used to changing pitches around for different sports. The fact that we had a game Saturday isn’t a big deal, really — in Huddersfield we often had a soccer game on a Saturday afternoon and had to turn the pitch around for rugby league the following day!”

Ellis has been in contact with his Lansdowne Road counterparts ever since he started: “Just helping each other out, really. We’ve had meetings and looked at how each does things, to see if we can learn anything.

They came over earlier and dropped off flags and pads for training today, actually, so that brings it home, that it’s getting close.

“February is normally a tough time for growth, but we’ve got decent grass cover, hopefully we’ll come out alright. We’ve had a mild winter, and if we have a couple of cold nights we’ll put on the under-soil heating. I put it on last night so we could work on the pitch today, for instance — to wipe away the GAA markings and start lining the pitch for rugby.”

Walking out onto the field itself, Ellis points out the faint outline of the rugby sideline, a guideline that’ll be painted over in the next day or so. A vague notion becoming more realistic by the day. Remind you of anything?