Module 1:

What is a football pitch?

1.3.6

Our completed worksheet

Here are all the 26 features, along with a short, suggested, description. See how they compare with your own ones.

Feature	Purpose
1. Uniform green colour of stripes:	To provide for a well-presented pitch.
2. Bare areas:	To be kept to as low as possible as these affect playability and pitch appearance.
3. White lines:	To be clearly marked, with a uniform width and straight (or curved for centre circle, penalty arc or corner areas), to ensure everyone can see pitch dimensions.
4. Smooth even surface:	Not an undulating one, or one that has lots of holes or depressions in.
5. Goal post, net, and corner flags:	Neat and tidy for presentation, and undamaged so safe for players.
6. Surface water / ponding:	Affects play and can be unsafe, with matches being cancelled.
7. Pitch dimensions:	To comply with provider requirements.
8. The pitch is clear of leaves and debris:	Improves presentation and their presence can negatively impact playability, and potentially player safety.
9. Sward height:	To be a suitable grass length, as we don’t want the grass (or other vegetation) to be knee high!
10. Root depth:	To produce a harder wearing pitch and encourage more drought resistance.
11. Earthworm activity:	These can produce muddy surfaces, at certain times of the year, and when present in high numbers.
12. Live ground coverage:	Produces a good playing surface that also looks good.
13. Weed content:	Looks unsightly and can affect player control of the ball.
14. Disease damage:	Kills grass in patches, looking unsightly.
15. Pest damage:	Often results in dead, bare patches and turf being more easily kicked out.
16. Desirable grass content:	These provide for a better playing surface.
17. Undesirable grass content:	These are more easily kicked out and often more likely to suffer from disease attack.
18. A safe run off area:	To ensure players do not run into barriers that are placed too near a pitch.
19. Grip for players:	Provides traction for turning and ball control.
20. A firm surface:	Not too hard or soft; it can influence fatigue levels and injuries.
21. Bounce of a ball:	For control of a received ball; not too high or too low.
22. Distance a ball rolls	For control of passing the ball, to help judge force needed for a pass.
23. Soil pH:	To allow the grass to grow within its optimum range.
24. Soil nutrients:	To provide adequate food for growth.
25. Organic matter content:	To improve overall soil quality and nutrient retention.
26. Water infiltration and drainage rate:	To reduce waterlogging and surface ponding. It also influences irrigation into and through the rootzone and the distribution of fertiliser nutrients into the rootzone.

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Once the worksheet has been completed, we should now start to be seeing the benefits of being able to describe a range of features. These start to provide a much fuller picture of what is meant by a football pitch.

Hopefully you can now recognise many of these features on your own football pitch.

Developing features further.

To develop these features into performance standards that can be used to manage a pitch and provide useful feedback data not just to the groundskeeper but also the club coach / manager, support staff and players, there is an important component which is missing.

Can you guess what that component is?

Figures, values, a range of values, objective statements, or similar.

It needs to be something which can be measured which has a meaningful outcome. Ideally it is also able to be measured fairly easily and relatively quickly, without the measurement equipment being too costly.

It should not be a subjective statement because this will be an opinion which will vary according to who is making the statement, so there won’t be much useful data or information that can be used for managing a pitch.

We've covered some good ground in this first module, so well done for reaching it to this stage. Let's now have a quick summary of the module and we will also throw in 3 multiple choice questions as a method of recall to help gauge your learning so far.

Module progress: 82%