Goodbye and thanks to groundsman

Chris Ralph bade a fond farewell to Plainmoor at the weekend after six years as the Gulls’ head groundsman.

Ralph has been headhunted by Devon neighbours Plymouth Argyle to lead a much larger ground staff team which covers not just Home Park but several other facilities around the city.

The former Hele Park Golf Club head greenkeeper from Newton Abbot has won friends and admirers throughout his time with United.

The club pushed the proverbial boat out more than once in an effort to keep him, but career moves in Ralph’s field in this part of the world don’t come around too often and the Argyle job was just too good for him to turn down.

Chris’ National League Groundsman Of The Year award in 2017 earned him plenty of plaudits, but perhaps his greater and more lasting achievement will be the two overhauls, especially the second this summer, which he carried out on the Plainmoor pitch.

He was the first to acknowledge the support he received from United’s owners, saying: “We have been able to do the work that has been desperately needed for a good few years. We have been able to get the pitch to a standard that I have wanted for some time.”

The demands of the groundshare deal with Truro City have already tested Ralph’s new surface, and still are, but he believes that the underlying work on drainage and soil quality has given the pitch a resilience it did not have before.

United have received plenty of applications to take over, but assistant Julian Gouldthorpe – he has worked hard on the club’s Seale Hayne Training complex – will ‘hold the fort’.