This time round, we’re delighted to have interviewed one of the real unsung heroes of Luton Town – Richard Bird, Head Groundsman for over 32 years.
Known as ‘Dickie’ to many, a nickname given him by Mick Harford, he has seen it all in his time – and as a fan, too, before working for the club. He took time out to talk to us as he prepared for last Saturday’s match against Stevenage. A game which not only went ahead against a background of severe weather forecasts, and widespread cancellations, but was also played on a near perfect surface. But it wasn’t always like that…!
Richard, let’s start with you telling us a little bit about yourself, your history with Luton Town and how you came to be Head Groundsman.
I’ve always been a Luton fan – my dad took me to my first game in 1972, against Hull City. We lost 2-1 but after that it was in my blood, and mum and dad got me a half season ticket in the Bobbers for Christmas when I was 14. I did seven full seasons, every game home and away, from 1980 to 1987. Then I missed a game to play in a snooker competition. We got knocked out in the first round and missed us beating Liverpool 4-1 with Mike Newell getting a hat-trick!
I started as a groundsman at a golf club and learnt a lot tending the greens. Then one day I was at a match as a guest in the Eric Morecambe and got talking to John Buttle about the pitch. He jokingly asked me if I wanted a job and I said “you couldn’t afford my wages”! Then I noticed in the Luton News that the head groundsman had left. I was fed up of where I was working at the golf club and thought ‘what the heck, I’m a Luton fan, let’s phone him’ and so I went in and had an interview with the club secretary. I didn’t hear anything for several weeks so thought I’d blown it. However, out of the blue, he phoned me back and I had an interview with the board and David Kohler, the chairman. A week later they offered me the job, so I jumped at the chance.
When was that – when did you start as Head Groundsman?
It was 22nd March 1993. That’s my wife’s birthday, so I couldn’t forget that – and here’s the thing: about eight out of the next 10 years we had a match on the date so I couldn’t take her out for her birthday! It didn’t go down too well at the time but it’s quite comical really.
Anyhow, that first day I walked in there – there was a game, I think it was a youth game, and it was pouring with rain. There were puddles all over the pitch and I thought ‘what on earth have I done’! There were four games left to get through that season and the pitch was atrocious. There was no grass on it except a little bit in the corners and down the Bobbers side. I got it green again for the next season, but it was never right. The pitch had been re-laid after the plastic pitch was removed and the drainage was always faulty. But the club didn’t want to spend the money on it because in those days we were going to move to the chairman’s Kohlerdome.
Before Gary Sweet and 2020 came in, the regimes we worked under were always reluctant to spend money on the pitch because they couldn’t see any return on it. We don’t bring money in like commercial or the ticket office, in fact we spend it. At the end of the season, they had to get as many pitch hires in as they could and that paid for renovation during the summer.
But things have come on since my early days. We’ve played games in the past where now we wouldn’t even have come down the tunnel because the pitch would be unplayable compared to what we’re used to. That famous Barnet game on New Year’s Day back in the Conference days springs to mind. The pitch was like a cow field after the game. It should never have been played but it was on TV, and it was a pivotal game for our season. We won, went four points clear at the top and never looked back. The pitch didn’t recover though, throughout the rest of the season it was like something from the 1960s, covered in sand.
If you think about between then and now what would be the pivotal things that really changed?
It’s more of a science now. One of the things that no one back then would even have thought about was taking every blade of grass off the pitch and starting from fresh in the close season.
That started when a machine called the Koro Field Top Maker was introduced – I remember reading about it being used first, at Port Vale, and the groundsman was nervous, but they reseeded the pitch and it worked a treat. So we did the same the following year. I was nervous too, but it works so well. The idea is, you take out the top layer, including all the rotting-down grass from clippings that have flown out of the box. You’re getting rid of all the organic matter so you have a clean fresh surface. But the thing is, the top is only as good as what is underneath – and 10 inches down, we have rubble from the old artificial pitch times. There’s not been a full reconstruction since 1991, and we only started making real improvements in 2010 under 2020, when we put some drains in. I remember saying to Gary, “look, grass is a living plant and if you put it under water it can’t breathe”, so they went ahead and did the drainage, which just transformed the pitch.
When we got to the Championship I asked if we could take it to the next level with ‘stitching’ in the goalmouths and in the penalty boxes, and Gary came back to me and asked for a price to do the whole pitch. Which we did. Basically, that’s like a polypropylene thread that goes down 180mm every 50mm sq. and it’s sewn into the pitch by machine. Once the grass starts growing, the roots wrap themselves around the threads. You can’t pull it out, it keeps a flat surface and plays a lot truer, in the winter especially. We spent a six-figure sum to do that and it’s unbelievable. You don’t get divots – you might get a scar, but not big clods of earth flying out. That’s the technology behind most pitches now. We also aerate it when necessary, with machines called ProCore Aerators, and Verti-Drains when we need to go a bit deeper. The roots get stronger, which means the grass on top does too and we can control the moisture.
How do you keep up with technology?
We do a lot of reading! My number two here, Jamie Marshall, is phenomenal. He loves his job so much. He’s been with me seven or eight years, he’s 24 now. He started working in the kitchens cooking for players after games and talked to our stadium manager Peter Kemp about how he’d love to be out there working on the pitch, so we took him on, put him through his Level 2 training. Then he was poached off us by Wembley! He went there but it wasn’t busy enough for him because he wanted to be working all the time, so he asked if he could come back. He now runs the pitches for a lot of the day-to-day training sessions at The Brache, leading the team of lads – we’re five in total – and to make everything ready for the next day. When he goes home, he’s researching all the time. He’s really full on – and that’s refreshing, because as a sector we struggle to recruit good young people into this game. Young lads would rather be doing something with IT in a nice warm office! I was talking to Jack Wilshere the other day and he was saying how much bigger the grounds teams are at Arsenal and West Ham, but we do well and we like a challenge.
What does your working week look like?
When you come into this job you have to realise it can be seven days a week. We try to work 8-4 but, if there’s stuff still to do in readiness for the next day, one or two of us will stay on. We don’t have set hours as such and the club is happy to leave us to get on with it.
We get everything ready at The Brache as well as the ground of course. We have four pitches up there, including one for the Academy, and an all-weather pitch. We don’t have undersoil heating at Kenilworth Road, which is why you’ll have seen pictures of that heating dome over the pitch to ensure the game was on last Saturday. That’s brought in for Sky TV under an EFL agreement. We work around training patterns at The Brache – if the players are in on a Sunday, so are we – making good any damage, cleaning up the pitches with rotary mowers and so on. For a Saturday match day at this time of the year, we’ll cut the pitch on Thursday, then again on the Friday and mark it out so it looks its best with neat white lines.
What was it like preparing for the Premier League with the Bobbers being built in the close season?
Challenging! We knew if we won at Wembley, we’d be building a new stand but in case we lost we had to be ready too, so we’d already renovated the pitch. We won, and the very next day people were in stripping out the old executive boxes then flattening it so that pitch was lost and we didn’t get it back until the beginning of July – and we had four weeks to be ready for the Carabao Cup first round.
I don’t think anyone has ever done it so quickly before and the whole stadium was still a building site with workmen in and out all the time. We’d purchased a new turf pitch to be laid down in case there was a problem, but the club wanted it seeding so that’s what we did. That turf went up to The Brache, and we seeded the Kenilworth Road pitch one Tuesday and played on it four Tuesdays later against Gillingham. It scarred up a bit but the improvement three days later against West Ham was impressive.
It certainly wasn’t straightforward though. There was some damage to the pitch with stuff being dumped on it which killed the brand-new grass within two weeks, so we had to get the stitching machine in again just to make it look green, even though it wasn’t really ready for playing on. Rob Edwards and everyone looked down from the gantry and you could see it was patchy, but just because it was the first game didn’t mean the pitch would not keep on maturing and getting better.
I joined a Premier League Head Groundsman’s meeting on Zoom and when I was telling them about the new stand and pitch, some of these top groundmen in the country couldn’t believe what I was saying. 28 days to grow the pitch! It’s been done at 35 I think before and we’ve obviously got more knowledge of chemicals and stuff to apply during the grow in, but for 28 days you need everything to fall into place, including the weather – and that was kind to us. The only comments to come from the West Ham game were from the referee who thought the grass looked longer in places. It was in fact that some of the grass was at different levels of maturity. After that we had no adverse comments at all, it was great.
We had a dispensation about not having undersoil heating, so we had the pitch protection company that we used last Saturday on call. It was a bit stressful but when you’ve got the best players in the world on your bit of grass, well it’s a bit special, to say the least.
Looking to the future now, what are your thoughts about Power Court?
It’s what the club has been crying out for, for years. I love Kenilworth Road but it’s like it’s held together with sticky back plastic in some ways now. We’re going from there to a state-of-the-art stadium. It will be amazing. But you’ll see grown men crying the day we leave Kenilworth Road. I’ve got so many memories there from boyhood to manhood.
What sort of pitch do you envisage there?
The agronomist we use for pitch renovations, Dr James Welch from Whitehorse Contractors, is deeply involved in plans for it, the construction and dimensions and what it’s going to be like underneath. When they’re ready to put the pitch in, that’s where we’ll get involved. I’ll be so proud to be part of that, if I’m still here at the club.
We’re sure you will be Dickie, you are part of the fabric! Finally, do you have a message for your fellow Luton fans?
Our fans are out of this world. They’ve supported us through thick and thin, administrations and dropping into the Conference, then up through the league to the Premier and are sticking with us now. There can’t be any better fans than Luton fans. And I’m proud to be one myself.
Thank you Dickie for providing us with our Luton Town ‘field of dreams’ for so many years!
