McKenna confident of staging pitch re-lay

GAELIC GAMES:NOW THAT the scale of the U2 stage in Croke Park has become fully evident so too has the scale of the challenge facing the stadium grounds staff. It's enormous on both counts, and while U2 are guaranteeing their concert stage is the biggest in rock and roll history, so too have the GAA been guaranteed their sporting stage will be back in place in time for next weekend's All-Ireland football quarter-finals.

The man behind that guarantee, Croke Park stadium director Peter McKenna, was characteristically calm and assured in giving his assessment of the work to date. The easy part, he admitted, was removing the old pitch for the construction of the stage.

Only next week will they know how well they cope with the hard part – the complete re-laying of the new pitch surface in just over three days.

“The most dramatic activity, removing the old pitch, was done last week, in advance of the U2 stage being set up,” explained McKenna.

“Following that the sand base and grass foundations were replaced, and that process worked very well. So the majority of that work, the bulk removal of the old soil, the scooping out process, which is fairly evasive, is completed. That was all done before U2 moved in on Monday to begin constructing the stage. And in that regard everything is going to schedule so far.”

In the meantime a plastic covering has been spread over the entire pitch.

U2 play the first of their three concerts tomorrow night, the second on Saturday, and after a rest day on Sunday, play the third night on Monday.

Part of the challenge facing McKenna is that even when the concerts are over it will take some time for the set to be taken down. The 11-storey, 550-tonne stage doesn’t just fold down like a deck chair.

The GAA have been told the pitch will be ready by the following Saturday, August 1st. Three of the All-Ireland football quarter-finals are due to be played over that weekend, most likely one on the Saturday, and two on the Sunday – with the fourth game already postponed to the following weekend due to the third-round qualifier replay between Roscommon and Wexford.

It will be Tuesday morning before the process of removing the stage is under way, which effectively gives McKenna’s team just over three days to lay the new sod: “It will take up to 42 hours to take down the entire stage structure,” added McKenna. “Of course we already have the freshly harvested turf ready, being stored in fridges. And we will be working hand and glove, in that as we remove each part of the plastic covering and the stage, we will also be laying the new turf.”

If all that goes to plan then the new pitch will rolled, marked and ready to play on the Saturday. Weather conditions won’t be a factor either, and in fact the rain showers forecast and generally wet conditions expected to last into next week will help that process in that there are ideal for laying turf, which needs to be sodden in the first place.

McKenna met the GAA’s Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) earlier in the week to assure them they could press ahead and fix the All-Ireland quarter-finals for Croke Park next weekend. The draw for those quarter-finals takes place on Sunday, with the CCCC then confirming the dates and venues on Monday.

At that point U2 will still have another concert to play and the process of re-laying the pitch won’t even have begun. “We wouldn’t have taken on these concerts if we weren’t confident of having the pitch ready,” said McKenna.

It will be an extraordinary transformation, assuming it all does go to plan. McKenna has pointed to the fact they’ve already experimented with the process by re-laying 20 per cent of the pitch after the recent Take That concerts. They had an eight-day window on that occasion, whereas next week they have just over three days, with the process multiplied by five. You do the math.