Muddy Fields!

Now that I’ve set the I.F.A. to rights I’ll revert back to one of my favourite subjects, the state of opposition grounds that we visit during a season. On arrival at Limavady Showgrounds last Saturday we realised we were faced with a simple choice, go in early and get a good seat in the stand or face the likelihood of a heavy soaking if we cut it a bit fine and didn’t get a seat. Limavady you see don’t have any covered terracing, in fact they don’t have any terracing full stop. Poor and all as this is, its nothing compared to the surface the players are asked to play football on. It was considered so poor on Saturday that both sets of players had to do their warm-up exercises outside the perimeter of the pitch. Once the game started it was easy to see why, the pitch resembled a glue pot and turning was completely out of the question. The fact that both teams managed to serve up a decent game of football was all down to themselves. I can understand how hard it is for teams to get the infrastructure of terracing and stands as these things don’t come cheap, but surely their number one priority should be to provide a decent playing surface. If we had had a decent surface last week we could’ve put up with the draconian facilities, as at least we’d have witnessed a good game of football. But to have neither of these facilities, sitting in an excuse for a stand or chancing ‘your arm’ on the sidelines and finding that the ‘fayre’ being served is not of the highest quality, is enough to drive anyone to drink. We owe it to the players to give them the best conditions in which to perform and then if they don’t deliver the goods, we can point the finger at them and demand to get answers. Twice during the second half United players fluffed good openings with crosses that ballooned high over the bar and behind the goal-line and this in my opinion was solely contributable to the state of the pitch. As the old saying goes, ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’, but with a decent playing field perhaps we can get a bit of real entertainment!