So I was watching some footage of premiership football from the 90s and the pitches were muddy and the players were muddy when getting up after tackling etc.
You watch professional football from decades earlier and the are even more muddy.
Now if you stick a match on, after an unbelievable wet winter and spring, the pitches at St James’s, Anfield, old Trafford are immaculate and the players walk off looking like they don’t even need to wash thier kits.
What’s changed?
In: Other
> “They had an injury list the length of your arm,” he recalled. A more stable pitch would start to solve that problem. But there was a more tactical reason for signing Calderwood: before his arrival, the pitch was too slow, too bobbly, too unpredictable for the kind of high-tempo passing game played by most of Europe’s elite teams. “The owners realised that it wasn’t about buying 11 world-class players,” said Calderwood. “They needed things behind them to allow them to work. One of the main things was the pitch.”
Pitches like the muddy ones were terrible for the game.
[‘The Silicon Valley of turf’: how the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-valley-of-turf-uk-perfect-football-pitch)
Latest Answers