Grass roots of the games

Two ends of the country, one date ringed on the calendar. On Sunday May 25th, David Hanley will turn the key in the gates at Semple Stadium at 7.30am. Two hundred miles to the north around the same time, Colm Quigley will do the same in Celtic Park. They will be the first to arrive by the dawn's early light and later, after 14-hour shifts during which a total of somewhere close to 60,000 people will drift in and out of their stately pleasuredomes, they will be the last to leave.

For they are the groundsmen.

They’re there when you’re not, they’re there when you are. Pockets weighed down with tangled balls of keys, bottomless lists of things to be done and people to be organised. Grounds, toilets, VIP areas, stands, terraces, shops, seats, sandwiches, whatever else you can think of. And the pitch. Above all the pitch.

“If I wasn’t married with children, I’d never find a woman,” laughs Hanley, the groundsman in Thurles since taking over last summer. “Sunday morning – in at six, finished at half-five. Monday morning, half-seven till five, Tuesday half-seven until nine o’clock at night for a challenge match. The hours don’t bother me in the slightest because I just love it.

“It’s just incredible to be here on a big day. I could only put it on a par with when my children were born. The hair on the back of my neck stands up with the buzz of a full stadium. The atmosphere last year for Cork and Kilkenny was electric. I’ve been there for Munster finals and I’ve been there as a spectator and a supporter before.

“But to be there that day, knowing that I’ve done what I’ve done to get it ready, seeing how the crowd react to the play on – and I know this sounds silly – but on my field, was just incredible. I hadn’t felt it any other time, other than as a Tipp supporter at an All-Ireland.”

Quigley has been doing the job in Derry since the turn of the millennium. He makes no bones about it – there are plenty of days when the magic of it all can be difficult to locate. Days are long and thanks are rare. Yet despite himself, he wouldn’t be without it.

“I’ve been doing it for 15 years. I knew the caretaker for years and he came to me one day and said there was a post going and would I be up for it. I said I’d do it for a year. And here I am, 15 years later. You either love it or you hate it. You don’t do it for the money, for the money’s not good.

"I'll not pass 20 years in this place, I'll tell you that. I'm getting past it, to be honest. I'm 40 this year and I think it's time for a change soon. I do enjoy it but it's hard. You have to put up with a lot of people. You're having to deal with sub-committees telling you what to do, committees full of men with nothing better to do with their lives."

Blood racing
Ah, but surely the dawning of the summer gets the blood racing, no? Surely the groundsman looks forward to championship as a kid looks forward to Christmas?

“No, I do not! Sometimes I pray that the matches will be shifted somewhere else! Ah no, it’s a great thing for us. I mean Derry and Donegal here with 17,000 people in through the gates, it’s going to be amazing really. And to be honest, it’s great to actually be a part of that.”

Though much of the work is taken up with making sure the peripheries are just so – “I’m just powerwashing the terraces here,” said Quigley the day we rang.

“If somebody falls and breaks their neck, it’ll only cost the county board more money!” The pitch is the thing. There are outside companies who work on the grass from time to time but the day-to-day maintenance comes down to the groundsman and his staff.

Hanley has sometime Tipp panellist Pa Bourke to help him. Quigley has a couple of local volunteers who come in and give him an hour here and there. They walk the pitch first thing every morning after a match or training session. They replace divots the same you would on a golf course, they cut once every week, sometimes twice.

After they cut it, they line it. One man lining a pitch takes four hours. Once a year in Semple, usually around mid-April, they spread 120 tonnes of Wexford sand on it to help with the drainage. You wouldn’t do it if you didn’t take pride in the result.

“My father is dead four years this year,” says Hanley. “And one of the things that hit the most when I got the job was that my dad was gone. I was so proud to get it but I had that bit of sadness because I couldn’t tell him that I was the man who got to hang the tricolour at Semple Stadium.

“And that’s not a republican thing – that’s not what I mean at all. But just the pride of hanging the tricolour and looking down over the field that my team and I got ready, that myself and Pa put our sweat and effort into and it just looking beautiful. It’s an amazing feeling. I’m only a small part of it.”

Even Quigley, for all his harrumphing, concedes that he wouldn’t be at it this long if was really all that bad.

“Naw, in fairness, the whole place itself is great to be a part of,” he says.

“Even if I finished up as groundsman, I’d probably still be on the committee and I’d probably still go around raising money for it. I’d like to see the day when we can get the capacity up to 23,000 and see the next stage of development finished. I give out about listening to committees but they’re great fellas really, they put in a lot of work and time.”

Nobody puts in more than the groundsmen, though.

Nobody anywhere.