The grass is green, and the line is white… That’s thanks to Kevin and his team.
Kevin Ingemann Johansen is the ground manager at Gladsaxe Stadium, and together with the rest of the hard-working ‘green’ team, he is responsible for the turf at Gladsaxe Stadium.
“I’ve been in the football world for 15 years. Before I came here (ed. Gladsaxe Stadion), I have worked in FC Copenhagen and Hvidovre IF. Division, Superliga, Champions League and European Championship.”
Kevin is a trained groundsman. A groundsman is, according to himself, a further development of a greenkeeper. As a groundsman, you work with taking care of sports facilities by taking care of care and other maintenance of the grass, striping, maintenance of irrigation systems, lighting systems and much more.
“My job is to make sure that we always have the best possible football pitch. That it is not too dry or too wet, and that it is as even as possible.”
A normal working week
But what does a grounds manager do during a normal working week? While many may only see them at half-time, where they walk around poking the ground with big forks, this is only part of a groundsman’s job.
“We close the wounds that form on the pitch during matches to ensure a smooth, safe and playable surface,” Kevin explains.
Therefore, the work between matches is just as critical as during. After matches, repairs, watering and sowing of specially developed grass seeds are carried out, among other things, to maintain the quality of the grass.
A care plan
Kevin usually creates a care plan during a football season that includes everything from water drainage to rolling mowing to achieve the optimal hardness on the pitch.
“We start up in the spring season, where we have to make sure to get rid of all the water that is in the rink. For that, we have something called a verti-drainer. It sticks down some large thick spikes, which make a kink in the track and give a lot of air to our roots. This means that the roots go downwards, so that the pitch becomes stronger and does not get kicked up when used.”
“When the players are about to use the track, we use a John Deere 3-link mower. It has some weight in the front and rear rollers that help to roll the track evenly. Then we have a click hammer, which is a measuring instrument we use to find the right hardness for the pitch. A football pitch should normally be in 60-70 clicks in the hammer. The number of clicks is crucial for the speed of the pitch, so we usually assess our clicks after talking to the coaching staff.”
It is therefore not only the technical aspects that drive a ground manager’s decisions.
“Part of my job is to be in dialogue with the coaching staff and understand how they want to play football. It affects how we treat the pitch, what we do with fertiliser and what we do with the length of grass,”
“We can also help create a pitch that makes it more difficult for the opposing team to play. If they usually play on artificial turf and are used to faster ball handling, we can raise g
Raced a little bit more to make it harder for them to play their game,” he adds.
The decision to move the quarter-final match against FC Nordsjælland due to the weather and the condition of the pitch illustrates the complex responsibility Kevin and his team carry.
“There was nothing I wanted more than to play the game on our home ground, but we had had so much rain in a short period of time and we couldn’t get rid of the water. I had to assess whether it was potentially dangerous to play on the pitch, and in this situation it was. You couldn’t stand firm on the pitch, and we could already see a bit of that during the Vejle match.”
When dealing with a living organism, it requires careful care.
“We can’t drive it when it’s too wet or when there’s frost. It will completely destroy it, and in the worst case, it can result in the map dying. We usually resume work when the track is dry enough for us to drive on it. Then we cut it in tartan or what some people call UEFA cuts, and then we also create some areas that I call work blocks, where we spray fertiliser, for example. All of this helps me in many ways to manage the grass better, so it does what I want it to.”
Although the winter period limits activities, Kevin is optimistic and hopes to hit the magical 5 degrees around the clock before the spring season to ensure that Gladsaxe Stadium reopens.
