Hockey pitch made from sugarcane to be used in Britain

ISLAMABAD: Hockey managers in Pakistan may or may not know that a revolutionary change in the playing surface is set to take place.

New Zealand will play Great Britain on a portable hockey field to be set up at London’s Twickenham Stoop, home to the Gallagher Premiership rugby team Harlequins.

As The Stoop does not have a synthetic surface, it was decided to move to the 15,000 seater stadium — which if at capacity will see the largest hockey attendance in the United Kingdom since the London 2012 Olympic Games — for just one day of hockey.

The surface currently being installed at The Stoop for the upcoming FIH Pro League matches will be a version of Polytan’s Poligras Tokyo GT, the turf system that will be used at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

The surface — which is made from sugarcane, a sustainable product — requires up to 65 percent less water than the surfaces used at previous Olympics. Polytan has been one of the driving forces behind the innovations that will be trialed at The Stoop, finding new ways to both lay and lift a synthetic surface in a very short period of time, doing so in a manner that will allow the surface to be re-used time and time again.

With sugarcane in abundance and water scarce in parts of Pakistan, the idea of having this new playing surface could well prove beneficial for staging a revolution at the grassroots level in the country.

Also involved in the partnership are Polypipe, the developers of the Permavoid system which supports the turf by ensuring that drainage is provided in a temporary location whilst also allowing air to flow, keeping the grass alive over the period of use.

Since their introduction in the 1970s — most significantly at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games, the first Olympic hockey competition to use a technology that has been employed at every Olympiad since — synthetic surfaces have changed the game almost beyond measure, providing a consistent, predictable surface which made hockey even faster and triggered the development of an array of new skills.

Over the past 40 or so years there have been huge technological advancements in order to constantly meet the ever-changing requirements of the sport, moving from sand-dressed surfaces right through to the development of water-based pitches and on to the water-saving surfaces that will be in use at the hockey competitions of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

While these high-tech surfaces often take months to install, the option of simply constructing a hockey pitch in any stadium you choose for one-off international matches has not been on the table. However, thanks to a ground-breaking partnership in the United Kingdom, boldly spearheaded by England Hockey, that dream is moving towards reality.

It is not the first time that a non-hockey specific stadium has been used. The Netherlands staged both the 1998 and 2014 Hockey World Cup events in existing football stadiums. However, there is a significant difference between what happened at Utrecht in 1998 and The Hague in 2014, where essentially permanent constructions were put in place for a relatively short period of time, to the temporary and endlessly repeatable model being trialed at The Stoop.

It is a trail-blazing move which has happened as a direct result of a national association’s desire to maximise the opportunities that come with the FIH Pro League’s home and away format. The ground-breaking developments that lie at the heart of England Hockey’s project could, according to FIH Facilities & Programme Manager Alastair Cox, be genuinely game-changing for the sport.

“If we can make this work, it suddenly means that hockey can be played in any venue anywhere in the world,” says Cox. “There is a hardcore community in hockey that loves the sport and will go and watch it regardless of the venue, which is fantastic, but if we want to engage with the broader audience, we have to make it as an attractive, appealing and enjoyable experience as possible.”

There are plenty of reasons why the ability to rapidly construct a fully functioning international standard hockey pitch in virtually any stadium in the world would be hugely advantageous to the sport.

Rather than having to spend huge sums of money overlaying an existing hockey venue with the required infrastructure (constructing spectator stands, broadcast and media facilities, marquees for hospitality, pitch lighting suitable for television broadcast), a ready-made stadium comes with all of these things and more.