Greening of Euro 2012

It’s the middle of the day and there’s a man sitting in the bar of a hotel by Croke Park showing me a video nasty on his laptop. “Look at this,” he says with a grimace, “it’s a horror story.”

And he’s right, this is real X-rated dirty stuff — but, stop, there’s no need to call the vice squad. The man with the laptop is Richard Hayden of pitch specialists STRI (the Sports Turf Research Institute) and the footage he’s showing me is from the Romania-France friendly on September 6 last year, a fixture which was supposed to provide a suitably glamorous first night for the spanking new National Arena in Bucharest.

Instead, right from kick off, the pitch started to come apart at the seams, the occasion degenerating into an embarrassing spectacle in which player safety on an increasingly pot-holed surface became the primary concern. The next day, Le Monde called it “a parody of an international match” played on “a grotesque field of potatoes”.