By Prof
June 15 2006

In this fourth report from the Quinssa AGM Mark Evans talks about ground developments including the possibility of a new South Stand and the state of the pitch.

There will be a new scoreboard [ironic cheers from the audience] – you people have no sense of tradition!

More money will be spent on the PA system, the memorabilia will be sorted out in the members’ bar, there will be improvements to the debenture lounge – we don’t want to say “we’ve done all the improvements” we want to keep upgrading everything year after year. 

South Stand planning permission is going in in a couple of weeks, we hope there won’t be a problem getting planning permission and we were 80:20 certain of starting in January 2007 but now it looks like we won’t have the financing in place in time so we are probably 80:20% the other way now so we’ll probably start building works in January 2008.

 

Q: The pitch was looking sad last season, I haven’t had a chance to look at it this evening, what is it like now?

A: When we built the Lexus Stand the foundations blocked one of the drains that takes the water from the pitch and deposits it in the River Crane. Also tests on the topsoil in January/February showed that it wasn’t exactly what we needed, it was allowing water to sit on the surface, so the sand was needed to sort this out. When you are out of the growing season it takes a long time for the pitch to recover. 

Some people said that the Quins RL games caused some of the problems but looking back there were only three more games between September and April than the season before so that isn’t a significant increase in usage. Seven of the top thirteen clubs in the country have a double use pitch and one of the worst is Leicester who only use if for Rugby Union, although they do play on it a lot. So I’m not really worried about the pitch for next season.

 

Q: Can we have our in goal areas back please?

A: Do you mean because they were smaller when we played the double header here? That was just to make the remarking of the pitch quicker between the two games, it was a non-competitive game for us so we allowed the RL side to have the smaller in goal areas. They used our markings for the first couple of games. But even the smaller in goal areas aren’t as bad as Loftus Road – I could have jumped that and I’m not a good long jumper!