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”.

By the time that newspaper hit the streets, Richard Hayden was already on a flight to the Romanian capital, having answered an emergency call from Uefa at half-time during the game. The pitch had been installed by an Italian company but it was to STRI that the authorities turned to find out what had gone so horribly wrong and, more importantly, to make sure that there wouldn’t be a sequel at the recent Europa League final in the same venue.

“Modern stadium environments are very difficult places to grow grass because they’re so heavily shaded,” says Kilkenny-born Hayden, operations director for STRI. “Essentially, in Bucharest, they built a fantastic arena but, with the weather conditions, the turf just deteriorated very rapidly. It looked perfect before the event but when they played on it, it suddenly disintegrated. So it was very embarrassing for them to have this at the opening of their stadium but at least it wasn’t the Europa League final.”

Viewers of Atletico Madrid’s victory over Athletic Bilbao a few weeks ago will know that this was also a result for STRI, the new pitch holding up perfectly for its most important game to date. And now the next big test, in an always packed agenda for the specialists in pitch research, design and construction, is Euro 2012. STRI has been responsible for installing the pitches in three stadia in the Ukraine and overseeing the relaying of surfaces in Poland, as well as ensuring that Ireland’s training grounds in Montecatini and Gydnia will also be up to scratch.

The greening of Yorkshire-based STRI began when Hayden emigrated from Ireland to join the company in 2005, subsequently becoming the first ever staff member to be appointed a director. Hayden began hiring others from the old sod, as it were, and now STRI can be employing anything from 20 to 50 Irish people at any one time.

Hayden says: “The Irish travel well, they’re flexible, they tend to be able to handle a crisis — and they are loved all over the world. I can send fellas into fire-fighting scenarios and they’ll also have the skills to drive a tractor or change the oil in a machine. If an engineer out of college joins my crew, he has to be able to wear a suit and drive a dumper! But it is still an English company and I’m happy to fly the British flag because England has been very good to me.”

Central and Eastern Europe’s brutal winter posed particular challenges for STRI as it worked on the installation of pitches in the Euro 2012 venues in Kiev, Kharkiv and Donestk. It was in the Ukraine for over a year before a spade was ever put in the ground, overcoming massive logistical problems in order to bring huge volumes of gravel and sand by train from a quarry a thousand miles away and then by truck into the cities at night to avoid traffic jams.

The pitch work itself involved excavation first and then the installation of everything in layers, working from the bottom up to accommodate essentials such as irrigation and undersoil heating. “It’s like the grass aspect is almost a small part of it, like the icing on the cake,” says Richard. “The engineering part is huge.”

STRI is also overseeing remedial work in the stadia in Poland, including the grounds where Ireland will play their group games. “We’re taking a particular interest in Poznan,” says Hayden. “They’ve had six pitches there in the last year. So we’ve supervised taking out the pitch and relaying it.”

And then there is their commitment to ensuring that, unlike the last time Ireland went to a major tournament, there are no hitches with the training pitches.

“Anytime I’ve ever met John Delaney or other FAI officials, the training pitch is the central focus,” he observes. “It’s amazing how high a priority it is. Maybe it happened from Saipan, but there is an understanding that this is a central part of everything you do. You can get away with a dodgy shower or a light bulb that doesn’t work because it can be changed. But you can’t get away with a dodgy pitch.”

Euro 2012 is by no means STRI’s only big contract this year — it will also have input into the London Olympics (for the cross country event), the British Open golf championship and Wimbledon. And, even now, Richard Hayden is frequently in and out of Brazil where the company is laying the groundwork, so to speak, for the 2014 World Cup.

The Kilkenny man might always be sure of a prize seat at some of the world’s biggest sports events but, unlike the rest of us, he has no problem keeping his eyes off the action.

“I was a greenkeeper in Mount Juliet for eight years during my college years and I never once played a round a golf — and I would have had free golf in that period,” he laughs. “I’ve always tried to keep a professional distance from the game itself. Like, I sat in Johannesburg for the World Cup final in 2010 and I couldn’t tell you what the score was because I was looking at the surface at all times. Often in those situations, I just stay for the first half. And once everything is fine, bang, I’m off at half-time and onto the next flight to the next location.”

Wherever he lays his pitch, you might say, that’s his home.