Saints submit plans for 150-seat grandstand

ST MARTIN'S have applied to the Island Development Committee for permission to build a 150-seater stand on the far side of Blanche Pierre Lane. Saints president Henry Davey confirmed this week that the club had moved a step closer to realising its major ambition of erecting covered seating. They hope to receive IDC approval within the next two months.

'Plans have gone in and we're just waiting and hoping that the IDC will say yes in principle,' said Davey.

Saints will apply for Football Foundation funding to build the stand, which Davey said would be 'a fairly simple and easy-to-assemble structure' and could be in place for the start of the 2004/5 season.

In order to blend in with the conifer trees at Blanche Pierre Lane, the seating and possibly the entire stand will be green.

The club, which redesigned and extended its dressing rooms last summer, is also awaiting approval to refurbish its bar, clubhouse and toilets.

Davey said that the improvements would make Blanche Pierre Lane the best football-only facility on the island, which would be testament to the hard work of Davey and Neil Hunter, in charge of facilities development.

That claim was endorsed at the start of the season by the Guernsey Football Association, which agreed a deal with Saints worth up to £2,400-a-season to make Blanche Pierre Lane the senior, under-21 and junior island teams' new training base.

And for any ex-footballers who played in the muck and nettles era of heavy boots, sodden balls and mud-caked pitches, just consider this: Saints have recently fitted central heating in their dressing rooms.

But it's not all good news at Blanche Pierre Lane.

Even Davey, the most ardent and passionate of Saints, was forced to admit that the club's once-gleaming playing surface is 'not quite what it was'.

The jibes about Saints calling off games whenever it rains are as old as the club's 39-year tenure at Blanche Pierre Lane.

The pitch used to be like a bowling green and other clubs can't understand why so many matches are postponed at the venue which for four decades was acclaimed as having the premier surface in Guernsey.

But Davey said that the criticism was misplaced. Blanche Pierre Lane just doesn't drain like it used to, he claimed.

'I wouldn't say that the surface has deteriorated particularly. When it's dry, I still think it's the best surface in Guernsey, but down the flanks - where it's very, very wet - there are problems.

'On both sides of the pitch, 20 yards in from the touchline and on either side of the halfway line, drainage is now poor. It retains so much more water these days.'

Davey blamed rising water tables in the south of the island: 'In the high parishes, the sub soil is clay and water goes through clay very slowly. And because of all the rain, the water levels have risen.

'The rain that falls on the pitch has got to find somewhere to go and the clay sub soil together with the rising water tables under the ground have made drainage a real headache up there.'

The Saints president, formerly a Muratti-winning centre-forward, said that Blanche Pierre Lane's pitch problems date back 'about two years'.

'When referees have postponed matches, the flanks have been the problem areas. Sometimes, if you kick a ball and let it bounce in the middle of the pitch, it will bounce above your head, but if you do the same in these problem areas, the ball won't even bounce up to your knees. Players could therefore misjudge the bounce and might end up clobbering someone, which is what makes it dangerous.

'It's okay for someone to go on the pitch, walk down the middle and say that it's playable, but they don't walk the flanks and inspect how wet they are.'

If one follows Davey's logic to an endgame, the reasons behind Blanche Pierre Lane's wet flanks could lead to the ground becoming continuously waterlogged in the winter months. But putting things right would cost a fortune, warned Davey.

'The cost of sorting it could be enormous. I've spoken to Peter Jackson at the States Works Department and I think he's going to speak to the States Recreation Committee about the possibility of fitting a herring bone drainage system, which is what they've put in at Foote's Lane.'

SWD general manager Dave Parrish, despite making it clear that he had not investigated Blanche Pierre Lane in detail, shed some light on the complex issue.

'They've made sand slits at Foote's Lane and cut a trench under the pitch. The water goes through the sand, through a pipe and then into the nearby stream,' said Parrish.

'Clay obviously retains much more water than sand. The sand slits just help with natural drainage.'

Parrish disputed the claim that water tables had risen in the south of the island, but said that rising localised levels could be responsible for the problems on the flanks at Saints.

Blanche Pierre Lane's clay base is there to stay, but the club's headache could certainly be resolved, said Parrish.

'They could still create a sump, cut a trench and fill it with sand. As long as the water was running through sand and gravity was pushing it, that wouldn't be a problem. It would just act like a cesspit.'

Parrish forecast that Blanche Pierre Lane could be 'put right' with tens rather than hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of investment.

He said that he had contacts with several UK businesses who would be willing to work on Saints' ground and he even suggested that SWD would be prepared to make available its own trench-cutting machine.

Davey has racked his brain to come up with affordable solutions. His opinion was that 'the possible lack of streams at Blanche Pierre Lane' could be the major prohibitive factor.

'We know there must be streams up there because we've got a bore hole that never dries out. But I don't know where the streams are.'

Finding their location would be a pre-requisite before installing a new, high-tech drainage system, said Davey.

Meanwhile, the Saints president responded robustly to claims that his club had called off games unnecessarily simply to protect their pitch.

'Sometimes you just can't play on it. And this is where people don't think before opening their mouth. We know more about our pitch than they do.

'It would be stupid to play on it on a Thursday night and make it unplayable for the next week when you could put a game off on Thursday and then play on Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday. By being sensible with the pitch, you gain in the long run.'

Davey revealed that Saints had spent about £4,000 in the past 10 months on looking after their pitch. 'That isn't cheap. We don't want to play on it and ruin it after that sort of expenditure.'

He also put into perspective the financial pressures that all local clubs were working under in 2003.

'We took £31 at the gate in a Priaulx League match against Rangers recently. Then we had to pay the referee and linesmen £38. Without making something at the canteen and over the bar, we would've been out of pocket.'

For a club with such lofty ambitions to develop its already-superb facilities, finding the cash is becoming increasingly difficult.

Its once-sparkling pitch might just have to be sacrificed on the altar of financial pragmatism.