When El Tel’s QPR installed Britain’s first artificial pitch

Loftus Road was the first ground to lay a plastic pitch in British professional football, seven years which brought accusations of extreme home bias, excessive bounce and nasty carpet burns

Queens Park Rangers made a habit of getting under the skin between 1981 and 1988. Or at least their artificial pitch did. When Rangers finally ripped up their infamous synthetic ‘Omniturf’ surface, it ended a seven-year itch to reintroduce the green, green grass to Loftus Road.

More accurately, it closed the book on seven years of carpet burns, lacerations and scars, seismic judders to the joints delivered courtesy of a bone-hard pitch. Plus, a tennis-ball bounce that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Wimbledon.

“Basically, it was a bit of carpet over two feet of concrete,” said Peter Hucker, goalkeeper in the Hoops’ Division Two promotion-winning season of 1982-83. They won 16 of their 21 home matches, lost just twice and scored a league-high 51 goals on their path back to the top flight as champions.

In the dugout was a 40-year-old Terry Venables, long since a man with a plan. With delicious irony, he had co-written a novel a decade earlier – while he was a QPR player – called They Used to Play on Grass, predicting that plastic pitches would become the norm. His imagined footballing future was now fact.

A series of harsh winters had caused fixture-disrupting freezes at the fag-end of the 1970s, sending the predictors of the Pools Panel into overdrive.

The Loftus Road playing surface was notoriously atrocious, too. The boggy quagmire it became in the early winter then solidified into a hard, rutted pitch. And when that eventually thawed out, the final weeks of the season witnessed more silty than silky football, with barely a blade of grass visible.

Chairman Jim Gregory’s patience had worn out as he tried, after relegation to Division Two in 1978-79 followed by 5th and 8th-placed finishes, to seal a swift return to the top tier.

“Whatever he spent, he couldn’t seem to solve the problem,” recalled Venables (left). “So he said, ‘What about a plastic pitch?’ We chatted for a while and it was a big step forward. And he said, ‘There are no rules to say we can’t.’ So I said, ‘Come on, then – we’ll do it!’”

The Rs dispatched a working party to America to seek a solution. Astroturf, developed in the ’60s – and an attractive secondary revenue generating option given its suitability for multiple events – had been used for a World Cup qualifier between the USA and Canada in 1976, and was the staple surface for the North American Soccer League.

If it was good enough for Pele, Cruyff and Beckenbauer, it was good enough for Clive Allen (above), Simon Stainrod and Terry Fenwick.

In the end, Rangers – who’d recently finished the last phase of their ground redevelopment – plumped for the rival surface, Omniturf. Topped by a layer of carpet on sand above a concrete base, it cost £350,000 – a significant outlay in the early days of the first million-pound player. Mindful of the American models that made stadiums multi-purpose at a stroke, Jim Gregory picked the harder of the two pitch possibilities.

Traditionalists prophesied the arrival of the end times, just as they’d done in Edwardian days when a ‘grass carpet’ costing £5,000 was used during a 1905 indoor floodlit exhibition at Olympia. The FA voiced concerns about ‘the dangers of many kinds, and clubs playing outside the pale of the Association’.

But three-quarters of a century later, on September 1, 1981, QPR and Luton Town (who were so impressed by it they eventually got their own) made English football history in the first league game contested on an artificial surface. Andy King created a slice of folklore by scoring QPR’S opener, but the visitors departed with the points after a 2-1 win.

The initial responses were relatively positive. Daily Star reporter Bob Driscoll commented, “As a milestone in British soccer history, it was perhaps the most important this century.” Warming to his task, he added, “if you thought soccer was a kick in the grass, you’ll reckon it’s fantastic on plastic.”

The players themselves were less sure. As early as October, Blackburn Rovers complained after a 2-0 defeat to the Rs. “We felt the surface was not conducive to good football,” they stropped. Three weeks later, Leicester City also had their say after losing 2-0 in west London.

Following friction with the authorities after being granted only a one-season trial of the pitch, QPR threatened to pull out of the FA Cup. As a concession, the period was extended to four campaigns.

QPR supporters still fondly remember the swish passing game they played on it – there was certainly value to be had in keeping the ball on the deck.

The wild bounce was tough to control, never mind master. Predicting what the ball might do in windy conditions would have taxed a pinball wizard.

Almost as bad was the accompanying shredded skin, plus muscle tears caused by sprints and stops on unfamiliar and unforgiving ground. No sane goalkeeper ever emerged from the tunnel without tracksuit bottoms. Conspiracy theorists even suggested that the Rangers squad were contractually forbidden from ever criticising the pitch.

QPR finished 5th in 1981-82, their first campaign on plastic, two points short of promotion. That 2-1 defeat to eventual champions Luton was one of only two home losses, conceding a miserly nine Loftus Road goals all season. They also reached their only FA Cup final, helped by home wins over Blackpool, Grimsby and Crystal Palace before the semi-final. Promoted as champions the following season, Rangers came a heady 5th in 1983-84, a performance which landed El Tel the Barcelona job.

Having qualified for 1984-85’s UEFA Cup, the Rs hosted games at Highbury as European football’s governing body refused to sanction matches at Loftus Road. Storm clouds were gathering as Rangers escaped relegation by a point, even if elsewhere plastic proved popular.

Luton laid their Sporturf International pitch in 1985 but Everton defender Kevin Ratcliffe wasn’t impressed, claiming that playing on it regularly would shorten his career by five years.

Then in ’86, Preston North End turned Deepdale artificial with Sporturf, as did Oldham Athletic at Boundary Park. Latics boss Joe Royle felt things had moved on significantly from QPR’S pioneering pitch, which he called ‘a nightmare’.

“I once saw a keeper take a goal-kick,” he said, “and it bounced so high that it flew over the crossbar at the other end.”

Preston – who’d come second-bottom of the Football League the season before and had to apply for re-election – were instantly promoted in 1986-87. Oldham reached Division One in 1990-91.

But meltdown was imminent. The Rs, who’d been first in, were also first out, appearing on plastic for the final time against Sheffield Wednesday in 1988.

Synthetic surfaces were prohibited in the top two tiers in 1991. Preston, the last survivors of plastic’s fab four, kept theirs until 1994 when, citing excessive bounce and the threat of injury, finally gave it the heave-ho.

Despite the advancements in drainage and undersoil heating, the intervening years have witnessed a rebirth of sorts. Cumbria-based SIS Pitches were behind the 95 per cent grass, five per cent yarn surface at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, which staged the 2018 World Cup Final. Similar pitches are used by Derby County and several European sides. In Scotland, where Dunfermline Athletic’s synthetic pitch was outlawed in 2005, 15 of its 42 professional outfits now play on them, though popularity is mixed.

Given football’s age-old reluctance to embrace change, real grass was – and is – always likely to be a bit greener. If, on reflection, QPR’S plastic wasn’t that fantastic, it was at least a bold, futuristic move trying to push the envelope.

Seen then as gimmickry and offering an unfair advantage to the home team, the surface certainly left its mark – as anyone who performed a sliding tackle on it would readily testify.

“I ONCE SAW A KEEPER TAKE A GOAL-KICK AND IT BOUNCED SO HIGH THAT IT FLEW OVER THE CROSSBAR AT THE OTHER END”