The hottest days of the summer just gone coincided with the final week of the school summer term, Wimbledon finals weekend – and the busiest period of the cricket season. While for most, the most pressing concerns are limited to panic-ordering a cheap fan or trying to ignore the condensation on a pint glass mixing with palm sweat, cricket club groundskeepers toil through what can feel like a volcanic war.

“I’m a busy guy,” says Alex Fitzgerald, head groundskeeper at Brooklands Sports Club in Manchester. As he speaks down the phone, his voice goes up and down as he walks at a quick pace, and various doors creak open followed by metallic clangs of machinery. At one point in our discussion, the call disconnects as he takes a delivery.

“People think we just turn up and cut grass and go home. That is far from our job,” he continues. “At amateur level, you often see groundsmen doing three, four, five other different tasks, including being an electrician, being a plumber, fixing things and being a handyman, but also providing a playing facility so a game can actually be played… Without a groundsman, this game doesn't exist, and it quite literally is as cut and dry as that.”

Brooklands is one of the lucky ones, free from many of the financial and resource constraints smaller clubs battle on a weekly basis. It has extensive facilities: “Two cricket squares, 14 astro-tennis courts, three grass tennis courts, a lacrosse pitch and a bowling green as well,” lists Fitzgerald. But, at this point in the season, it’s the first item on that agenda which takes up almost all of his time. “Myself and one other, we’re rushed off our feet in this particular period [late-June to early July],” he says.

Groundskeepers, like wicketkeepers, are often said to be best when not noticed, or at least when the pitches they prepare give no reason to draw attention. But, underneath every lazy weekend afternoon when players in whites while away the day on carefully curated green spaces, there’s a groundskeeper frantically paddling beneath the surface.

“It starts two weeks away from the first game,” says Fitzgerald. “We’re always working two weeks in advance of a wicket… On Monday morning we would go out and cut the wicket to height. We would then follow that up with a roller, and then follow that process on and off throughout the rest of that week, building up our rolling and our cutting as we get closer to match day.

“We brush the wickets repetitively to remove organic matter and stand the grass up to get a nice, clean cut with the mowers. We could do that two to three times per wicket each day. At this moment in time I’ve got three wickets that I’m preparing for the next five days on our front square. Those will probably have up to two hours worth of brushes a day. I’ll follow that up with a cut, probably a double-cut on those wickets. Then I’ll roll. Those wickets will get 30 to 45 minutes worth of rolling each.

“On a Wednesday we cut our outfields, and that takes around three to four hours for both. Then you’ve got things like practice wickets which will be used tomorrow and were used last night. It’s pretty endless. Think menial things like moving the rope, for example. We've got a massive rope that goes all the way around our outfield, and obviously it will stay in the same place, but when we need to cut our outfield, it takes one or two people to continuously pull the rope so it's all the way out to the boundary. That takes about an hour. I could go on and on and on.”

As the volume of games increases, with more women’s and youth cricket played each year as the game expands, the challenges groundskeepers face in order to keep players on the pitch have massively increased, both in number and scale.

‘It’s all or nothing’

Beyond making Fitzgerald significantly damper through sweat or showers, it’s hard to escape the massive impact climate change has had on his job over the last five years. While the difficulties of increased rainfall and soaring summer temperatures can be somewhat mitigated for at county and international grounds, with teams of staff and access to more ECB resources, the challenges facing grassroots turf are different.

This year, an ECB report put the percentage of clubs at risk of flooding over a third, and many others are at risk of drought. Pitches are waterlogged in the winter, with outdated drainage systems unable to cope with the volume and frequency of water deluged onto them, and then baked for week after week in the summer as outfields turn brown.

In July, Southern Water announced a Temporary Use Ban, or hosepipe ban, which coincided with the peak of the club season. Under the restrictions, groundskeepers are not allowed to water outfields or non-critical areas, with only “essential watering of key playing areas” permitted. In an already challenging environment, the new restrictions led to further complications to keeping club cricket running in the South.

“We’ve had matches abandoned on safety grounds during the Temporary Usage Ban,” says Hampshire Cricket Development Officer Simon Jones. “I’ve been told by ECB facilities colleagues that this has been the case across the country with the dry weather. With the prediction of where the climate is going to get to by 2050, this issue is going to become more prevalent, and we will be dealing with extremes.

“In 2023 our feeder league lost over 750 matches to the weather, which was probably about a quarter of the matches. We are seeing an effect on squares, and with the regulations, watering outfields is definitely out, so it’s a case of ‘proceed with caution’ when you’re playing.

“You might be watering more than the pitches you’re playing on and repairing. But, if you’ve got two pitches in prep and two in recovery, normally you could do remedial watering on pitches you’re not using so they’re ready for their next use – that isn’t permitted. You have to go pitch by pitch rather than looking after the whole area, so when a groundskeeper comes to a pitch, it won’t have recovered sufficiently. In club cricket, the vast majority of club-only grounds, you have something like 20 per cent of the expected rainfall between March and June, and it’s going to be dry right up until the end of August, so there isn’t much respite in sight.”

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Hampshire Cricket put on emergency workshops to help groundskeepers in the region adapt to the water restrictions. But keeping grass fit to be played on when the water supply is restricted is almost impossible.

“Grass requires two things to grow,” says Fitzgerald. “Sunshine and water. If it's not getting one of those two primary aspects, it's going to really struggle to either grow or to maintain its colour. Brooklands are exceptionally lucky, in the sense that they've got a superb irrigation system that wets the ash turf pitch, which is why it was put in. But there are also outlet points to the square, so we can get up to 10 bar of pressure to get water out to our squares.

“But I know for a fact that even if I went five minutes up the road to a club called Simply Sports club, they were struggling to get enough water out to the square to keep it in a reasonable condition throughout the drought periods that we've had.”

The other problem clubs face in adapting to challenges presented by weather extremes is the standard of machinery available to club ground staff. As budgets have been stretched and investment has been slashed, machinery has rusted away. Often groundstaff are forced to do bodge-jobs to keep the cogs turning.

It was a point England batter and EcoAthletes Champion Maia Bouchier referenced in an interview last year. “Climate change has been impacting cricket quite dramatically over the last couple of years,” she said. “The grassroots clubs with fewer resources struggle to maintain or upgrade their infrastructure to cope.”

“I haven't witnessed in probably 15 years of doing this job, a period where the ECB have provided a level of funding to clubs to be able to change their situation in terms of machinery,” says Fitzgerald. “It is a stagnation situation in the sense that people haven't been able to move forward from clubs that started out in the 70s, 60s, 50s, and the club's machinery is exactly the same as a result of it.

“There is no expectation anymore from groundsmen that they're going to turn up and have machinery that's been bought in the last five years. For example, I've seen cricket clubs local to myself that are using wicket mowers that are 25, 30 years old, that they have repeatedly done things to try and get them to just function adequately.”

The ECB County Grants fund does offer financial help to clubs looking to upgrade their machinery. That funding is limited to £10,000 per application and, for clubs looking for help funding a new electric mower or roller, the maximum grant will cover 25 per cent of the cost. Tackling climate change is one of the core features of the scheme, under which clubs can apply for financial support implementing systems such as rainwater harvesting and targeted drainage. While that funding is undoubtedly an important part of helping clubs adapt to ever-increasing demand, the scale of the work that needs to be done is enormous.

‘There's a ridiculous expectation now being set’

While ground staff are playing whack-a-mole with the threats to their playing squares being to sustain demand, there’s also growing pressures on them from players themselves.

“I think there's a ridiculous expectation now being set,” says Fitzgerald. “Unfortunately, the better professional sport gets and the more finances that are put into that level of pitch preparation, the more pressure that adds on to the amateur level [of groundskeepers] who have stayed exactly the same, who haven't increased their revenue, haven't increased their income, and they can't meet that standard. However, because the players have seen it on the TV every other week, it sets a precedent.

“I think it sets an expectation that the groundsman can do literally everything you want them to do on that piece of grass and have it perfect every single time, regardless of what's involved in that process.”

Telling a long-suffering groundskeeper like Fitzgerald how to do his job after a long hot day behind the roller feels like it would risk life and limb. But, in a twist of fate, 24 hours before our conversation, a video of India head coach Gautam Gambhir in a heated exchange with Lee Fortis – head groundskeeper at The Oval – went viral. For Fitzgerald, whatever the rights and wrongs of the interaction, it was emblematic of chronic miscommunication between those maintaining the facilities, and those who play on them.

“I think respect and understanding of our job is, in my opinion, the biggest obstacle we have,” says Fitzgerald. “That kind of situation doesn’t help anybody whatsoever, including groundsmen, including everyone below that level. It sets a bad precedent, and it falls all the way down to the amateur level.

“If you look at a specific incident like that, beyond the misconceptions there are already, that will now filter down because people have seen it’s acceptable at a professional level and they’ll question our roles. The understanding and reputation around what we do is our first and biggest issue.”

One of those misconceptions Fitzgerald mentions is the assumption that he does little more than sit on a mower all day. That illusion has seeped into the industry itself, with a chronic shortage of younger groundskeepers coming into the industry, with women also under-represented.

A report commissioned by the Grounds Management Association in 2019 found that women make up just three per cent of the sport turf industry, while more than half of grounds professionals are over 50, with a fifth over 60. Chairman of the National Asian Cricket Council Nasa Hussain told a landmark groundskeeping diversity seminar at Lord’s earlier this year that only around one to two per cent of those working in groundskeeping are from South Asian backgrounds.

“We don’t see new groundsmen come into the industry,” says Fitzgerald. “A lot of people will get to 65 years of age and start pottering around a club, and then eventually they become the groundsmen. That cycle goes on so when they give up in 10 years time, another retiree comes in. Unfortunately, rather than bringing younger people in whilst there’s an experienced groundsmen to get them started, people just wait until that person’s had enough and bring the next one in. A lot of younger people, if they are coming into the industry, are going into professional sport, in particular football, and it never really filters its way down into cricket.”

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The non-stop, thankless grind across all seasons ground staff put in for recreational players to put on their whites for a few months out of the year seems like a kind of purgatory, especially when considering the mounting challenges. But, for the likes of Fitzgerald, it’s clear the meticulous, skilled nature of the job brings out an obsessive satisfaction. As does the knowledge that, in reality, they’re the ones running the show.

“There are no two ways about it, if there are no groundsmen, cricket would stop,” says Fitzgerald. “We’ve seen in the last two or three years, a couple of clubs have started to falter when they lose the groundsman and they can't find anybody to do the job. Then the team starts to get a little bit disheartened and upset with the conditions that they play in. So the players start to leave, and then the club folds. We've seen that happen within two or three different clubs within our local area alone. Maybe it didn't start because of the groundsman, but that was one of the issues that they faced before they closed.

“It’s such a detailed job, that if you don’t have somebody who knows the ins and outs of how to do it, it wouldn’t be possible.”

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