LAUGHING STOCK
Brown fears poor Hampden surface will ruin semi-final
CELTIC and Scotland captain Scott Brown fears the rotten Hampden pitch will t urn next month’s Old Firm semi-final into a ‘laughing stock’ for the watching world.
Following a wet winter that left the surface in serious disrepair, a new pitch was laid ahead of the League Cup Final earlier this month.
But Brown, who insists the home of Queen’s Park compares poorly to the hybrid turf at Murrayfield in Edinburgh, says nothing has been done to solve the underlying problem.
Aware that a global audience will be tuning in when Celtic face Rangers at Hampden on April 17, the 30-year- old said: ‘That’s the thing—sometimes we’ re a laughing stock when it comes to that.
‘It (the pitch) probably won’t be the best but you just accept that every time you come here. You
think of the worst and, if we played on what we did against Rangers last year (in the League Cup semi-final), you can play on anything. ‘It’s part and parcel of the game these days. ‘We can’t keep it in great nick all season round because of the weather up here as well. ‘We’ve got to take that on board. But it should be a lot better than it is.’ Brown, who won his 50th Scotland cap in Tuesday night’s 1-0 win over Denmark, believes the fact that Ladbrokes League Two side Queen’s Park are allowed to play regularly at Hampden — they still own a stadium that has benefited from several multi-million-pound rebuilds — remains the root cause of annual complaints about the surface. ‘It was bang average as always,’ he said of his most recent experience on the turf. ‘But that’s what happens when someone else plays on it week in, week out. ‘You don’t see that happening in England or anywhere else — but that’s good old Scotia for you. ‘They say it takes four to six weeks to knit in and it has not had that time. ‘It is always going to be slippy with a little bit of rain on it as well. ‘But it’s a lot better than it was at this time last year.’ Asked if the solution lay in a grass-synthetic hybrid surface of the type installed at Murrayfield, where Celtic played Champions League qualifiers in the summer of 2014, Brown said: ‘Murrayfield is exceptional, so much better than that. It’s flat and nice. ‘When we played on that in the qualifiers it was unbelievable, one of the best pitches I’ve ever played on.’