Search: ' artificial pitches'

Bottom of the league with no points from 27 matches in the Unibond Premier Division, Owen Amos takes a look at what has gone wrong for the ambitious Durham City

According to the Northern Echo, Durham City are “the worst team in the country”. While that may not be true, they are by some distance the worst team in the Unibond Premier Division, one step below the Conference North. After 27 games, Durham had won none, drawn none and lost 27. They’d scored 16 goals and conceded 121, an average of over four per game. In fact, the only match they’ve won all season was at home to Washington – who play three divisions below – in the Durham County Challenge Cup.

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After a winter of mud and ice Ligue 1 sides are eyeing a permanent solution to bad pitches, reports James Eastham

When French sports daily L’Equipe described the Emirates Stadium pitch as “magnificent” the day after Arsenal’s 1-0 win over Roma in the Champions League last 16, you could almost hear the envy in their voice. Ligue 1 has just emerged from a winter in which the dreadful playing surfaces made a mockery of dozens of games. The word bachee (tent) entered the sporting lexicon as French clubs erected great big canvases over their pitches in futile bids to keep the frost at bay. When the covers came off just before kick-off, referees would usually decide pitches were playable, but the evidence in front of our eyes said otherwise.

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Unless something is done to improve grassroots facilities, we will never be able to improve standards of play, writes Gavin Willacy

I’m all for selling off playing fields. The majority of our pitches are good for nothing but walking a dog or building houses on. That suggestion may be considered heresy by callers to phone-ins and fellow feature-writers, but selling them off could be the answer to one of English football’s biggest barriers to progress.

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Forget about dodgy bounces at Kenilworth Road, plastic is back and, if it can get past a bit of red tape, could be the answer to football’s problems. As Steve Menary explains, they’re even complaining about the quality of the grass in Amsterdam

This was supposed to be the year of the artificial turf revolution, so where is it? Not that awful plastic stuff that left players with terrible burns, but a hi-tech mixture of man-made fibre and real grass has been allowed in the Champions League, UEFA Cup and Intertoto Cup for the first time this season.X

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  Neil White on the pros and cons of UEFA's plans for football's future pitches

When an irate Gerry Collins launched into a vitriolic rant at a post-match press conference last week, it had nothing to do with his Partick Thistle side’s insipid performance in their defeat by Dunfermline. Collins’ ire was dir­ected exclusively at Dunfermline Athletic’s new artificial pitch – UEFA’s view of football’s future.

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