It’s not a funny old game: plastic or grass pitches?

I LISTENED to an interesting discussion the other day about grass pitches versus artificial.

During the debate on the BBC NI’s Irish League Show, Glenavon manager Gary Hamilton claimed that a Man United scout once told him one of the reasons that less talented young players from here were making it in top level football in England was because they had grown up playing so much football on new generation surfaces.

Here’s what he had to say, “Football should be played on grass, it’s no coincidence that to play in the football league in England you have to have a grass pitch.

“Barrow came up (promoted) a few years ago with a 3G pitch and they had to rip it out. There is a reason for that, I don’t no what it is, but there is. You can only play on grass in the top four leagues and that’s the way it should be; grass for me at every level of football

“There is the other case were people are doing it for financial reasons and I get that too.

“It’s more of a challenge for young players to play on grass and it’s going to hamper them when they are trying to get careers in England as well. When they go to England they are going to be playing on grass and our kids are going to be coming through from four and five years of age; I know my kids are the same they have hardly played on a grass pitch in their lives.

“If those kids go across the water and try and transfer to grass, there is a big, big difference, a massive difference. I know when I spoke to a Man United scout on my PRO Licence he said that was a huge reason why there wasn’t as many players making it at top level clubs any more.”

Matthew Tipton, the Ards manager, agreed.

“If you have enough pitches, ideally you want to be playing on grass but we have to appreciate that we live in a climate and a country where training facilties are a problem for everybody and with having your own 3G 4G pitch it enables you to have a training centre on it.

“I prefer to play on grass but the problem is we don’t have enough good grass pitches. The first time a young player probably plays on a grass pitch these days is when he plays for the reserve team. Some of these kids don’t know what proper studs are!”

It’s hard to argue against those opinions. Like Barrow, Sutton United had to rip out their 4G pitch and replace it with grass when they won promotion from the National League to the EFL the season before last.

But there is no getting away from the fact that the trend is very much towards artificial surfaces and for teams lower down the football pyramid there are obvious reasons for that and most of them are finance related. Closer to home it has been all the rage in past decade. Take the Danske Bank Premiership for a start. Larne, Crusaders, Cliftonville, Coleraine and most recently Dungannon Swifts have all gone plastic.

Four clubs in the Lough 41 Championship are also playing on an artificial surface and in the ladies Premiership the majority of the games are not played on grass.

As Hamilton and Tipton pointed out, youth games almost right across the board are played on artificial surfaces these days.

Most people are well aware of the fors and againsts in both sides of this age-old debate and certainly those advocating new generation pitches will point to the huge advancements and development of the product over the years. Basically their argument is, it’s the next best thing to playing on grass.

I suppose time will tell how this one ultimately plays out but it does beg the question, what is the future?

Is it all plastic or will grass, for whatever reason, make a grand comeback in all its glory. I suspect the answer to that may well come down which is ‘greener’!