Dave Saltman gives his monthly update on the state of the pitch
Shrewsbury Town’s Head Groundsman, Dave Saltman, is hopeful that the pitch will be in good condition for the start of the season.
The recently prolonged dry spell has actually made life difficult with water in high demand, but Saltman is still pleased with the progress so far.
“We’ve had a few issues. We put new sprinkler heads into the centre of the pitch but we found that there wasn’t sufficient pressure in the system. When we investigated we found that irrigation pump was knackered, so we’ve had to get the guys back.”
“We’ve had two lines down the wings that have been very slow to come through, but they are starting to come through now. The pitch has been cut once already this week and the lads are about to cut it again, and then we will probably be cutting every day from now on.
“We’ve had some fairly extreme weather. Lionel Richie was three weeks ago and we had a bit of rain that evening, but we’ve had no rain since in temperatures approaching 30 degrees every day, but we’ve been really working hard, manually irrigating and just trying to keep the grass going and alive at the moment.”
Town take on Brentford in a pre-season friendly at the Montgomery Waters Meadow on Saturday 21st July, but Dave is concentrating primarily on the opening game of the 2018/19 campaign at home to Bradford City.
“We’re working towards Brentford as the pre-season game”, Saltman said.
“We accept that their might be a bit of damage in weaker areas on the stadium pitch, but once Brentford’s out of the way we will get two more growing weeks and every day we will see 100% improvement in the pitch, so by the time we get to the start of the season the pitch should be looking first class.”