Grecians see their clash at Newport postponed
EXETER City manager Matt Taylor said he, his counterpart Mike Flynn and match referee John Busby came to a “unanimous decision” that Newport County’s pitch was not fit for purpose, leaving them with no alternative but to cancel last night’s top of the table clash in League Two.
The seventh-placed Grecians, seven points behind the league leaders, were looking to gain ground on County having drawn with Forest Green Rovers on Boxing Day, but Taylor admits he feared the worst after he was contacted by Newport boss Flynn en route to Rodney Parade.
“Full credit to Mike Flynn, he gave me a call about an hour ago having just got to the ground himself and he said he felt it wasn’t playable and suggested I got here as quickly as I could,” Taylor said.
“The referee was here waiting for us and all three of us came to a unanimous decision that the pitch wasn’t playable.
“It doesn’t look too bad when you stand away from it but, as soon as you stand on it, it’s a bit of a swamp, I’m afraid. We know they had a game of rugby on it on Boxing Day, so we knew it was going to be a difficult surface no matter what, but I think the amount of rainfall this week has been too much.
“There is standing water there and it is probably not safe to play tonight.”
The cancellation is a frustration for the Grecians, who saw their game against Stevenage postponed just before Christmas due to a Covid outbreak at Broadhall Way. With no guarantee they will get a free run from now until May, especially as the new mutant strain of Covid is spreading exponentially across the UK, Taylor admits he is concerned the Grecians could face a fixture backlog in the new year.
“I think it’s a strange time,” Taylor said. “There are seven games off in League One due to Covid issues and a couple at our level, along with Mansfield because of the snow and now ourselves with the pitch, so it is a strange time.
“You do worry about the backlog of fixtures anyway and you worry what’s to come in relation to an ongoing Covid situation, which will probably get worse before it gets better, so it is a strange time to be a football fan and a strange time to be involved in football.
“We certainly aren’t going to moan about it, we are trying to make the best of it that we can, but we will jump back on the coach and have an hour’s training when we get back to the Cat & Fiddle.”
The one blessing for City was that this was their closest match of the season, so they will not have had too long sat wasting time for a wasted journey. This Saturday, the Grecians make a 665-mile round trip to Barrow for the first meeting between the two sides since Exeter thrashed them 7-1 in an old Division Four game in April 1972.
“That’s one of the positives out of it! It’s a shame we have had to travel because that pitch probably wasn’t playable from a much earlier time, but that’s the way it is,” Taylor added.
“But as I say, it was great of the Newport manager to be as honest as he was with me and it’s another game that we are going to have to play at a later stage.
“That pitch is going to cause some serious problems now that they are going to play rugby on it as well. Newport have played a fantastic brand of football so far this season and it will be a shame to see them have to change. But that pitch will cause them a few problems, I’m afraid.”
County’s Rodney Parade is owned and operated by the Welsh Rugby Union and it is also the home stadium of the Dragons regional rugby union team as well as Newport RFC.
The Rodney Parade pitch has had long-standing issues with waterlogging, despite having new drainage and irrigation systems installed in the summers of 2013 and 2014. However, that failed to solve the issue and a state of the art hybrid grass pitch was installed before the 2017-18 season, but still the problem persists.