DESPITE his lack of interest in the beautiful game, Irishman Richard Hayden has already achieved what Giovanni Trapattoni and his players set out to do, but failed: he has made a huge impact on the Fifa World Cup finals in South Africa.
The “pitch doctor” from Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny, was hired last February by Fifa to ensure all the playing surfaces the 32 teams competing at the showcase tournament will use are up to the required standard for the duration of the event.
Since then the 30-year-old, who is the operations director of the Sports Turf Research Institute (STRI) based in Leeds, has been travelling the southern African country non-stop in his quest to get the 10 match pitches, 32 training camps and 12 venue-specific training sites ready for the month-long event.
Yesterday, the Irish Timescaught up with him in Cape Town where he was overseeing work being done on a dry patch on a training pitch in Philippi, a township on the city's outskirts, where some of the competing teams are expected to practise.
“I was initially hired by the English Football Association to ensure the pitches at their base camp in Rustenberg, which were in a bad state, were ready in time for their arrival. They had seen the work I had done on the Croke Park pitch in August last year and were impressed.
“So once I started working for the English FA and getting results, the Fifa local organising committee asked if I would do work for them as a consultant, as they were having problems with a number of pitches,” he recalled.
Hayden says that agreeing to take on the job was “a little daunting”, not least because his professional credibility was on the line. However, he added he was never one to shirk a challenge.
“I thought to myself, ‘this could make or break me’. But I figured the risk was worth it after inspecting all the pitches over a week. It’s been a challenge, but as an Irishman you’ll always be keen to back the underdog so we decided to go for it.
“Because the country is so diverse climatically in each location, there has been a different set of problems in each place. But the guys working the pitches every day know where all the problems are, and I’ve been availing of their knowledge of the local micro climates to ensure we get everything right.
“I’ve also tried to become South African for the duration – this is a pride issue locally. With that in mind we’ve trained 3,000 people in pitch maintenance who we can now hand over the stewardship of the pitches to,” he said.
To date the most unnerving moment was when he was brought to inspect the Mbombela stadium near Kruger Park a day before more than 100 English journalists were taken to inspect the pitch. When he got there, he discovered there was no pitch at all to inspect, despite the fact a warm-up game was scheduled to be played in six weeks’ time.
“I stayed up all that night and used a bulldozer to try and get what was supposed to be a football pitch into some sort of shape. Then the following day I was wheeled out to face the press, who were sceptical.
“But after talking with locals who knew the climate, I was confident we could turn it around, so promised them we’d have green grass in four weeks, a warm-up game in six and a World Cup game in 10 weeks,” he said.
To avail of some extra technical expertise, Hayden asked his old mentor Aidan O’Hara, the grounds keeper at Mount Juliet golf course in Kilkenny, to come on board, and along with six other foreign pitch doctors, they have co-ordinated and instilled confidence in the 5,000 South Africans doing the work on the ground. “While studying for my agricultural degree and afterwards, I worked for Aidan at Mount Juliet, and he has taught me nearly everything I know. So it was great to have him on board,” he said.
During the event, Hayden’s work will continue, as he must ensure the playing surfaces are maintained to a high level. To that end he has hired five people whose sole job is to watch the matches and record how and where the pitches cut up, so they can be patched up afterwards.
And does he think problems will arise? “There will be problems, but we will deal with them. I have every confidence the pitches will hold up for the tournament,” he concluded.
So to, it seems, does Fifa. World football’s governing body has already entered into tentative negotiations with Hayden and the Sports Turf Research Institute to take control of pitch preparation for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, while UEFA has hired them to get the pitches ready for Euro 2012 in Poland and the Ukraine.