No time to watch the grass grow
Eden Park is in for a high-speed change this weekend, as rugby follows cricket
Eden Park's turf is set to undergo a major makeover in just 20 hours this weekend, and the process will deliver some challenges.
The field is being prepared for the Black Caps' first Twenty20 cricket international with the West Indies tomorrow, which gets underway at 7pm and won’t finish until after 10pm.
At 6.35pm the following night the stadium will host the Mitre 10 Cup Premiership rugby final between Auckland and Tasman, complete with a different set-up.
Eden Park turf manager Blair Christiansen told Newstalk ZB's D'Arcy Waldegrave it's a task they've endured before.
“As it gets closer and closer the reality became more real.
“We've done 24-hour turnarounds before; they always have their unique challenges and this will be no different. Not impossible, just challenging.”
Auckland hosted Waikato in their semifinal last Saturday at the venue, leaving the stadium's ground crew with the task of bringing the field up to international cricketing standards for Friday night, as well as a blueprint for how they will tackle the transition back to rugby.
Christiansen says that while there is “a bit to do”, going from cricket to rugby in such a short time is more desirable than the other way around.
“Doing the cricket first gives you a lot more assurance around the quality of what you're going to produce, and then we go and flip to rugby a lot easier.
“[Rugby] posts will go straight up, you sort of need that alignment tool for putting the field back in accurately, so the first thing is they go up. We've got logos to wash off, so some cricket logos we'll get rid of — that'll be done overnight. When we come in Saturday morning, the field will be ready to have the cricket tray come out and the field marking for rugby just goes straight in. It'll be about three or four hours post-cricket to get it to that stage, and there's the rest of the day on Saturday to sharpen it up. Some people may not even know the cricket was there.”
Christiansen says they washed the field straight after the semifinal, making the addition of the cricket markings relatively easy. What will be difficult is going back to rugby.
“We'll put that field back in on game day . . . therefore that's another task on Saturday morning.
“That's something that we don't normally do, but it's a lot easier if I do it in the light of day rather than 11pm on Friday night.”
The length of the grass is also an important factor, particularly given the time of year and the uncommon overlap of the two sports.
“Mid-winter for rugby we're at 34mm cutting height here, and we sort of keep that through until August. Then we traditionally start to bring it down — we might be at 25, and last week we brought it down further,” Christiansen says.
“We'll go to 13 or 12 for the cricket.” When asked how that affects rugby, Christiansen says it will make for a “hard and fast” game.
It all creates a busy 24 hours where working efficiently will be vital for Christiansen and his crew, but he says they wouldn't want things to be any other way.
“They're all well-versed on it and motivated for it as well. We've had time throughout the year to think about content that we wanted and now we've got the content, so everyone's pretty happy to have it. There's no complaints from anyone.”