With the season due to start Head groundsman Phil Collinson and his staff are working hard to put the final touches to the Spotland playing surface and when we interrupted his labours he expressed his pleasure at the way that things are shaping up ahead of a first home game against Oldham Athletic next Tuesday evening.

" We are quite happy. If you look back on the friendly games the pitch wasn't perhaps quite ready for sport but we have worked hard and standing here looking at it with a few days to go things are coming together nicely"

" Towards the end of last season one of the big issues to achieve during the summer was to work on the drains and to be fair the club have spent quite a lot of money on them. We have had some quite heavy rain of late and the pitch has taken it well. There is plenty of grass on it and we are ready to go again"

" With only having a window of three and a half weeks we couldn't be quite as vigorous as we might have wanted with the seeding.Ideally we would have taken the top of the grass off again to help the drains but we couldn't do that .What we did was scarify heavily and did the seeding and so far, fingers crossed, we have been able to get it looking well."

" This year has been the shortest window that we I have known. When I started 5 years ago we had 8 weeks, last year we had 2 blocks of 4 and this year as I say we have had just three and a half weeks from seed to playing on it. The rugby games haven't really affected the growth because when they play we can leave the grass a bit longer and basically they just run on it. In winter when it is softer they can do a bit of damage but in summer it isn't too bad at all"

Well done Phil and co.