Changing climate is Durham Cricket Club ground staff’s biggest test

DURHAM Cricket Club’s pitch has been a battlefield in more ways than one this season.

Propelled by a never-say-die spirit and star turns from players including David Bedingham, Ben McKinney and Ben Raine, ably skippered by Alex Lees, the men’s team has fought its way to the top of the County Championship table and the likelihood of a bounce-back promotion to Division One.

But at the same time, intense competition has been playing out with the quality of the pitch itself, as the club’s ground staff contend with disruptive seasonal changes that would challenge the calculations of the wiliest of Test captains.

Extreme rainfall, searing heatwaves and unseasonal and deadly frosts, (for grass seeds), are rapidly becoming the norm, forcing changes in pitch preparation not seen in generations.

At the age of 67, head groundsman Vic Demain could have been forgiven for thinking he had seen it all but admits the past few years have been a completely different ball game when it comes to maintaining the surfaces which support the nation’s traditional summer sport.

“It doesn’t help that the seasons themselves aren’t playing ball anymore,” he reflects, from his office in the shadow of the club scoreboard.

“I’m old enough to remember the great winter of 1963 and the heatwaves of 1976 and 77, but those were anomalies and stand out in your memory because of that.

“Generally, there was stability and predictability with the seasons, and you could plan and plant accordingly, year after year, but there doesn’t seem to be the spring, summer, autumn and winter that we used to get.

“Everybody’s focus among groundstaff this season, especially in the south of the country, has been on the extreme heat and the challenges that brings, which is understandable, given the constantly high temperatures they’ve had and no rain.

“When the surfaces suffer extreme dryness, and the grass dies back, cracks appear, you get uneven bounce and it even becomes dangerous – less safe to dive on, more risk of knee and wrist injuries.

“But, out of season, there are equally as many challenges too, because the intense rains we had last autumn posed their own problems, as did the frosty nights we’ve now started to regularly get in Spring.”

Traditionally, reseeding of the pitch begins in October, shortly after the cricket season’s end, but a spin-off of last year’s constant rainfall was that simply wasn’t an option at Durham, and many other grounds.

“Last year was incredibly wet during what should have been the planting season and what happens in those conditions is the new seeds sit in water and puddles, and they rot and die,” explains Vic.

“It’s a similar picture in Spring when we look to plant grass seed, where increasingly the weather is warm enough during the day but very frosty at night.

“You need temperatures of eight degrees and above for seeds to germinate and if you have genuinely freezing nights, it doesn’t matter how mild the day was, they don’t germinate.”

Vic admits that if he and his three-strong ground staff team had tried to follow traditional planting timetables, the results for this season would have been disastrous. “I would have had some seriously unhappy cricketers,” he says with a half-smile and a large dollop of understatement.

Instead, Vic and his staff did what everyone from the general public to major organisations are being advised to do in the face of climate change: adapt.

Towards the end of last season, the club began to reseed in August, whenever there was a break in fixtures.

“I’ve changed the approach to the yearly methods massively before because if I’d stuck to what we were doing previously, I couldn’t have guaranteed we would get the surface we needed for the new season,” said Vic

“The changes gave us half a chance, assuming the rains would come heavily in October, as they have begun to do,” said Vic. “Then, as well as reseeding in March, with the risk of frosts killing them off, we also reseeded in May, which was not ideal, but again, helped mitigate the situation.

“We try to seed little and regularly now, rather than just one time during the Autumn.

“People used to talk about putting the square to bed for the Autumn but we no longer do that because we’re not getting the hard winters and now you don’t do that because we’re constantly needing to be on there to sort out the water.” 

Now, it is high summer and on a non-playing sunny August day on the square, you are surrounded by the noise and sights of the ground staff, as Vic, his deputy Mark Patterson, Barry Bousted, Ben Hall and Jon Bland go about their work.

A tractor, a roller, a mower and a brush are all in action as the water sprinklers spin, but the wear and tear is clear to see on the outfield after so many weeks of hot weather, as well as the pitch now accommodating the juniors and women’s teams as well as the men’s.

What’s unusual about the work Vic and his team do is that while much of it happens away from the public eye, the outcome is judged every time the public comes through the gate.

“Yes, you can’t hide a cricket pitch,” concedes Vic: “and when people come to a game, they’ll usually see the ground staff sitting in the seats, and it’s easy to assume we’re not doing much.

“But we’re constantly trying to keep the pitch right throughout the year, as are the rest of the first-class counties in changing climate conditions, but the people you really have to feel for are those looking to keep cricket pitches playable further down the ladder.

“They don’t have the resources that professional cricket clubs do, so it’s a real labour of love, and we have to wait to see what the long-term impacts will be on them.”

Some hope and consolation is offered by the sheer durability and doggedness of grass.

“It’s an incredibly resilient plant, and we’re grateful for that in cricket because to make it perfect for the game we have to do many things, grass doesn’t like,” Vic acknowledges. 

“We do everything that’s wrong – we shave the top of the grass, starve it of water, and then we put a heavy roller over it constantly.

“How many plants would cope with that?

“Even in prolonged hot spells, you’ll see it recovering after one or two days of rain, but the problem is that you always lose some of the grass, so weeds and moss and other things you don’t want on the pitch will start to move in.

“It has reached the stage where we are looking at different types of grass; grass which is more resistant to extreme weather conditions, but, again, that would be another change.”

The changing climate is impacting sport across England in big and small ways, including across the North East.

Sometimes, it can be eye-catching, like Storm Desmond submerging Corbridge Cricket Ground’s pitch and sweeping away the clubhouse in 2015. It took £370,000 to make good again, the majority of the money being paid by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB).

Mostly though, it’s a creeping thing.

Golf courses at Alnmouth and Hartlepool affected by coastal erosion; the Russell Foster Youth League’s football teams unable to play for months on end this year because of months-long rains, rains that threatened to prevent the completion of the Northern League fixture list for the first time.

“People are beginning to get used to this change in the weather and now beginning to realise it is something they need to think about,” said Vic.

“For a long time we’ve heard about climate change and the change in the weather conditions, and I think people have said ‘oh, well, that doesn’t affect me,’ but I think even us old diehards are beginning to realise that actually it does affect us all.

“It is ongoing, and it is going to affect us all, and it’s not the climate that has to change, it’s us, the practitioners who need to change our methods and the products we are using to adapt and find the best way to meet the challenges the weather is throwing up.” 

Thankfully, for Durham Cricket Club, as its ground staff busily pivot and adapt, and the England v Sri Lanka one-day international looms into view next month, they’re not quite stumped yet.