An ode to the groundstaff, those unsung heroes of our game

PAUL EDWARDS: The reason I grab every opportunity to mention groundsmen is that there is almost no chance one of them will ever do so themselves. They belong to that huge group of people whose essential work is so often overlooked

One of the many benefits granted to a columnist is the opportunity to say "thank you" rather more publicly than could otherwise be the case. That freedom is all the more valuable when the recipients of one's gratitude are, as a rule, rather private people who do their best work away from the public gaze and rarely seek acclamation for it. Take groundsmen for instance…

I'm just coming to the end of my longest road trip of the season. It has taken me from Lord's to Trent Bridge and then on to Worcester. At each of those venues I was covering either the County Championship or the Royal London Cup, but in the middle of it all I umpired a friendly and informal match played to mark the imminent retirement of a man whose dedication to his craft has allowed many young cricketers to enjoy the game.

His name is Jim Head and he has been a college groundsman for 34-and-a-half years. As Jim pointed out on Sunday, that is half his current lifetime.

You might be thinking this was a rather posh occasion. You would be wrong. Jim's match attracted a great variety of folk, many of whom were not directly involved in the game taking place. The only things connecting them were the only things that mattered: a link to the college and a desire to thank the man whose hard work has enabled people to play cricket and football on trustworthy surfaces.

As it happens, Jim is also a fine cricketer and I must have played a few hundred games with him before I retired in 2001. We've travelled a few miles together and had a lot of fun.

But I don't want this column to be exclusively about Jim. Instead, I'd like it to be about the importance of his art and I'm also going to mention a few other people who practise it.

Whether Test stars or cheerful club players, all cricketers are at the end of their seasons. The success they've experienced will vary wildly but the enjoyment they've derived from the game will often have depended on the pitches on which their games have taken place. John Arlott once paid tribute to umpires, writing that they were the only people who could make or ruin a game of cricket. It’s a fair call but I reckon groundsmen are just as vital.

^{At all levels, the job is equally important...  (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)}

Only if you've played on a muckheap can you appreciate the importance of pitches. Batsmen are dismissed without batting badly; bowlers take wickets without bowling well. On top of which, medium-pace bowlers can cause serious injury. (Say what you like, a ball smacking you in the face at even 50mph will hurt.) No one derives any pleasure from their afternoon.

Of course, these things are relative; a pitch regarded as poor by the professionals might be viewed as perfectly adequate by some club teams whose ability to exploit small imperfections or eccentricities is not so great. But they are also universal. No one who heard Glen Chapple's forthright comments on the pitch used for the Essex- Lancashire game at Chelmsford can doubt that.

On the surface, Chapple was the quintessential professional coach whose county team had played on an inadequate wicket. But in a sense, he could also have been the club skipper who had travelled 40 miles for a game and had his weekend ruined.

Now it would be wrong for me to comment on a game I didn't watch at first hand, for it's remarkable how streaming or orthodox TV coverage can mask problems; but I was present at my own club, Southport and Birkdale, when a Lancashire second-team game was abandoned because the wicket was dangerous. No one with any experience of cricket could have doubted the umpire's judgement.

That's significant here because we've had a change of groundsman since that match and Colin Maxwell, our new man on the roller, is about the best signing the club's made in my 41 years as an S&B member. Lancashire are now happy to play age-group games on the ground and in July we hosted a County Championship match against Somerset.

I recall writing a column about it and there was a lot of love in those words. And the truth is that Max, like Jim Head, has made a vast difference to hundreds of cricketers' lives.

^{It's a thankless task (Sarah Reed/Getty Images)}

But another reason I grab every opportunity to mention groundsmen is that there is almost no chance one of them will ever do so themselves. They belong to that huge group of people – secretaries, scorers, junior coaches and most umpires – whose work, while essential to the health of our game, is so often overlooked. At the same time this column would not range so widely had I not just watched the Championship match between Worcestershire and Nottinghamshire at New Road.

The game was completed inside seven sessions. Worcestershire made 390 in their only innings and Nottinghamshire, who may well win the Second Division in the final week of the season, replied with 128 and 183. People glancing at the scorecard in future years might surmise that the pitch disintegrated early, but the surface was actually an absolute credit to Dave Banks, Worcestershire's new head groundsman, and Peter Moores, the head coach of the defeated team, said as much after the game.

Let us be very clear. A motorway rarely produces a good game of cricket. The ideal average score is each innings of a game should be around 290-340, although that doesn't really take account of the changes in the strip over four or five days or individual brilliance that can transcend any conditions.

The home side put up 390 at New Road because their skipper, Brett D'Oliveira, batted very well for 85 and Gareth Roderick played even better for a century. Then Worcestershire's quicker bowlers hunted as a pack against batsmen who were suddenly vulnerable. Banks' pitch was a fair test of skill and rewarded merit. You shouldn't ask too much more of a groundsman than that.

So, it’s surely fitting as autumn edges more obviously into our lives that we should think about the people who are just beginning some of the most important weeks of their years.

For Jim Head, Colin Maxwell and Dave Banks, the success of their end-of-season work will help to determine the quality of the pitches they can produce next spring. And having pondered the hard work done by these skilful people at thousands of cricket clubs, maybe it wouldn't be a daft idea if you sought out the groundsman at your own club – and thanked him.

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