the pitch, these being installed in the summer break specifically with pre-match and half-time watering in mind. "Short and wet is what modern day players and coaches insist on," says Andy.

Premier League requirements for undersoil heating meant that, this year, there had to be more substantial close-season changes to the stadium pitch, however.

Northern Ireland-based contractors, Clive Richardson Ltd., were called in by Andy to reconstruct it, taking it back to gravel raft, removing all the rootzone and introducing the company's own fibre-sand mix. Sub-contractors, Top Turf Irrigation,the irrigation system with Ken Pryor doing the undersoil heating.

I asked him about why the club hasn't opted for a Desso surface? "Desso is fine and does a great job at multi-use stadia. St Mary's is not like that," he said. "It'sinterested in telling me about how Staplewood is developing as a training complex.

Staplewood has been the training ground for the Saints since the early 1990s. It used to be just a single pitch us ed by the first team, with a mini training area alongside, and this switched to being a cricket pitch for a local club over summer. The rest of the current site had previously been arable farmland but, in the mid-90s, the club bought some of the fields to extend the training site to two pitches. In 2002, further fields were bought and two more pitches added. There hadn't been a specific plan. The facility just gradually expanded as the training demands of the club and its academy grew.

Laid in summer 2013 were two Fibresand