arenas arenas
American-born Tony Gordon has been arenas operations manager at the MCG since August 2012. The recent $1.7 million resurfacing project was his first involvement in a full scale redevelopment at the venue
MCG’s new
hallowed turf
Some 48 hours after the
Hawthorn Football Club snared back-to-back premierships for the second time in its history, the excavators ripped into the Melbourne Cricket Ground arena signalling the start of a $1.7 million resurfacing project. ATM editor Brett Robinson talks to arenas operations manager Tony Gordon about the process to renew the surface of one of the world’s most iconic sporting grounds.
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t’s a turf manager’s lot. Just when you’re satisfied with the surface you’ve produced, the next week the excavators are in ripping it up. Just ask Tony Gordon, arenas operations manager at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). Of the six AFL Grand Finals he and the MCC arenas team have prepared Melbourne’s iconic battleground for, the 2014 staging was just about as near to perfection as he could have wished for. A combination of experience accrued over his five-and-a-half years at the ground, finetuning fertility and topdressing programmes, the stadium’s artificial growth lights and Mother Nature playing her bit, all meant that when the first ball was bounced on Saturday 27 September Gordon stood in the machinery race a contented soul. But as turf managers well know, beauty isn’t all about what’s on top. While for the vast majority of the near 100,000 spectators who crammed the ground the surface looked immaculate, Gordon well knew there were some inherent issues below the pristine looking turf which were making it increasingly difficult to manage. To remedy those issues and with a hectic 2015 calendar approaching, which includes the Cricket World Cup, on 21 August the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) officially announced that the MCG would be resurfaced following the 2014 AFL Grand Final. The most extensive works since the ground was overhauled ahead of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the $1.7 million project would involve stripping and recycling the existing Motz stabilised turf surface, re-levelling and then laying just under 19,000m2 of HG Sports Turf’s new Eclipse stabilised turf product.
Australian Turfgrass Management 16.6
It was therefore a bittersweet moment for Gordon when on Monday 29 September the excavators tore into the surface he and the arenas team had so painstakingly prepared for the Grand Final 48 hours earlier. But as he has come to appreciate during his time at the MCG, it’s just “one of those things that we do here”. “In order for a field to perform well it needs to be uniform, so this rebuild sees us start from scratch again and all things going well it will hopefully last us for another 8-10 years,” says Gordon. “Since the redevelopment of the ground prior to the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the Motz turf system has been used and with the new northern stands that were built, it created a few management issues over winter. The original solution was to just use turf replacement as a way to manage the surface, but it wasn’t cost-effective and didn’t quite get the result that was expected. “In 2009 the MCC invested money in the SGL Concept lighting rigs and they proved so successful that we have significantly reduced the amount of turf that needs replacing to just a few critical areas. As a result parts of the ground weren’t getting replaced as regularly because they weren’t wearing out as much. That meant that over the years the older parts of the ground have built up levels of organic accumulation and would always be the first to go off colour or show signs of disease. “The centre corridor is the area most often replaced and in the six years I have been here there’s only been two seasons where we haven’t had to completely replace it. What we would do is place an annual order of turf a year ahead of time which would be used to repair the centre bounce