INGLEWOOD, California, June 19 : As soon as Switzerland and Bosnia were off the pitch after their World Cup match on Thursday, another team were on it.
But instead of tearing at the grass with studs this team were mowing, brushing, seeding, and repairing it.
After being battered by some of the world’s best and most physically abusive (to grass) players for two hours, the surface was getting some tender loving care – a necessity in this World Cup, which is often being played atop grass pitches placed on a sub-surface that usually supports artificial turf.
It has not all gone well.
French coach Didier Deschamps, after his side’s 3-1 win over Senegal on Tuesday, said his squad had to alter their boots for the New York-New Jersey pitch, which was not great.
“Let’s just say it’s … it’s different. It’s unusual, so you have to get used to it,” said Deschamps. “It’s different, so the bounce is different too.” None of his players used screw-in studs “even though boots today are a bit more adaptable.”
France midfielder Adrien Rabiot added: “The pitch … I don’t even know if you can call it that. It felt more like an artificial surface — quite hard and quite rigid.”
Commentators, reporters and TV viewers have also been worried about the state of that pitch, the most important stadium because it is where the final will be held on July 19.
To some, patches seem discoloured, with the area in front of goal a bit ragged.
The Vancouver stadium has, however, received some rave pitch reviews from players, allaying the worries of the groundskeepers, the farmer who grew and supplied the turf, and the local community, which is taking great pride in hosting the World Cup and wants to impress the world.
Australia player Aiden O’Neill praised it after his side’s 2-0 win over Turkey on Saturday.
“I think they’ve done such a good job to have it in the condition it’s in,” he was quoted as saying by the Globe and Mail newspaper. “The ball moved well. It wasn’t too hard. I think they’ve got it perfect, to be honest.”
Across North America, pitches are being put to the test, but each pitch is unique, much more so than at other World Cups.
Due to the stadiums being in very different environments, from high-altitude Mexico City to sea-level New Jersey, and from desert-like L.A. to humid Toronto, the pitches consist of different types of grass and each stadium has specific installation requirements.
Some get sunlight and some do not. Some receive rain, others never do. The players are operating in a huge range of conditions and so are the pitches.
WORLD CUP PITCHES FEEL WEIRD UNDERFOOT
Soccer biomechanics and injury prevention researcher Mike Hahn, associate director of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance who is helping to develop the shoes for the 2027 Women’s World Cup, said he understood why players might get rattled by World Cup pitches that feel a bit weird underfoot.
“They have such a fine-tuned feel for what it should be,” Hahn, who is watching the pitches as much as the players in this year’s tournament, told Reuters.
“If there’s a small difference in the compressive stiffness of the grass on top of the standard sub-layer, they could feel that small difference enough that their legs are having to stiffen up because it’s too pliant, or they feel it’s too stiff, so they have to loosen their legs.”
Hahn credits soccer’s world governing body FIFA with having well-defined standards and a rigorous testing programme for turf development, which allows for analysis of pitch performance.
The use of hybrid pitches for this World Cup, which involves grass growing through an underlying supportive synthetic layer that gives it extra strength and durability, makes the tournament a gigantic field test of cutting-edge approaches.
Despite the criticism about the New Jersey pitch, FIFA told Reuters that situation is better than it might look. The pitches “remain in excellent condition from both a playability and player safety perspective,” it said in a statement.
“FIFA’s turf management team’s assessment is that every pitch is healthy and performing as intended for elite competitions. Variations in the appearance of some surfaces, whether on television or in person, do not necessarily reflect the quality, health or playability of the pitch.”
Hahn said he was watching to see if any of the hybrid pitches tear under the intense pressure of maximum-speed players pivoting.
“You’re going full speed and making as sharp a cut as you can and all of a sudden it fails,” said Hahn. “It works great until it doesn’t.”
On the Los Angeles pitch the grass outfit were doing what they could to make sure their pitch does not fail.
One man was running what looked like a lawnmower, but instead of cutting grass it was putting new grass seed into the living pitch, covering every centimetre of the field.
Patches that look discoloured or ragged were being individually cared for by pitch-keepers, with a particularly noticeable patch being treated with what looked like fertiliser.
It is still early in the tournament and the pitches have weeks more to hold up, so the struggle between players’ studs, grass health, hybrid pitch engineering and the environment has only just begun.