Audere est Facere - To Dare Is To Do
As Tottenham Hotspur's Grounds Manager, Darren Baldwin, gives me a guided tour of the breathtakingly impressive new training centre, a word that keeps cropping up is 'aspiration'. He points out the skillfully re-instated natural hedging, a legacy of the land before its redevelopment. "We call this one Bechers Brook," he says.
The delightful natural barrier, mainly of hawthorn, berry-laden at this time of year, runs the length of the main driveway into the Centre. It provides a pleasing and distinctive dividing line between the club's schoolboy training area (for the under-8s and upwards) and the senior academy area, where life as a professional footballer begins to take shape.
Between the Academy area and the pinnacle of the Centre, where the Spurs' first team squad train, is another natural barrier of hedging. Darren says they refer to it as another of Aintree's legendary jumps, The Chair. The three specific areas are quite distinctive yet, in one regard, indistinguishable - the inviting, unblemished greenness of the playing surface.
The elites of the first team squad had done their day's work and left for other things before I arrived at Bulls Cross; not so Darren's team. They were hard at work keeping everywhere immaculate, and as Darren describes "to nothing less than 5-star standard". I saw exactly what he meant as we continued the UTV tour of the whole of the new complex.
The neat rings around each tree, light and sign also show how much Darren and the club care about detail.
He has been in charge of pitch matters at Spurs for sixteen years now. In that time, there have been ten first team managers, or coaches as they now seem to be called; Glen Hoddle and, more recently, Harry Radknapp perhaps the highest profile ones.
He tells me how new first team boss, Andre Villas-Boas - known everywhere in football as just AVB - now in his second season in charge has that same attention to detail philosophy in training and match preparation.
"He's made it part of his business to know exactly what we do. He's very pitch aware," said Darren. "He's interested in the surface preparation process and has impressive knowledge about what goes on."
AVB's attention to pitch detail is so important to him that he insists Darren goes on pre-season tours with the team to make sure training and
Darren enjoys working closely with players too. "You do need to know your players," he said. "Some just give you leg-pulling banter: some will give you helpful, constructive comment."
I asked him about language difficulties now that so many of the top players don't have English as their first. It seems the club's player liaison officer is always there to deal with any translation difficulties, so feedback on all matters relating to the business of football - and that includes pitches - is as accurate as it can be. Darren says he relies very much on a core of senior players, like the club captain Michael Dawson, on how players feel about a particular surface.
"It's great to be kept on your toes," said Darren. "Just as players perform better because of it, we try to produce better and better surfaces. None of us is ever satisfied, and that's great."
I'm given a real feeling that Darren's focus is never far away from his pitches as he catches sight of a very slightly leaking irrigation head. He records it in a notebook. It won't be leaking for very long.
Darren has a twenty-seven man squad, only four of which are based at the club's White Hart Lane stadium. He has a number of key players at Bulls Cross, each of them vital to the 5-star performance that's always expected. He says there are two words that together they all share: accountability and responsibility.
Included in the squad are six full time gardeners, led by head gardener Gavin Hardy. Plants, shrubs, fruit trees and, soon, a vegetable and herb garden are an integral part of the layout and they certainly give it a very rural and welcoming feel.
There's about 1.5 million pounds worth of turfcare equipment at the Centre. It all belongs to the club and it's as precious in its way as any of the club's big summer signings. Each bit of kit has a squad number, not surprisingly beginning with the prefix TH, specifically to keep tabs on their fitness for the job.
When the Centre first opened last year, Darren gave a four year maintenance contract to Ernest Doe. It means a specialist mechanic is on site three days a week, and on-call for the rest. After eighteen months in operation, this is clearly an arrangement that's working well for Darren and his squad.
The centre has fifteen pitches but, with areas for special training needs, it equates to about twenty all told. Limagrain MM60 ryegrass mix is used, cut universally and daily to 25mm, though this will rise to 28mm later in the autumn when growing slows down.
Half of the first team's pitches are Desso Grassmaster, with undersoil heating to replicate White Hart Lane conditions. The remainder are Fibresand with no undersoil heating. For the senior academy and development pitches, four out of five are Fibresand. The schoolboy pitches are all natural rootzone, some of them supplemented with sand. All of the training pitches are fully drained and irrigated. There are hundreds of miles of piping beneath the surface and over 600 Hunter sprinkler heads watering not just the pitches, but all of the hedges, tree rings and lawns.
"This is massively important and gives us a full range of spacing, tine widths and depths to suit all conditions," he said.
So far, Darren says there are no turf bug issues, just the usual risk of fusarium, which he says he successfully combats, by and large, by dewing all the pitches every morning. "We're as green as we can be and will only use fungicides if we absolutely have to," he said. "We do use compound fertilisers, but supplement this with a lot of seaweed liquids. As a boost to establishment after close season renovation, for example, we've been using Headstart seaweed extract treatment."
"Our green footprint may not be as all embracing as Forest Green Rovers, but we certainly do what we can. Rainwater from the buildings here is recycled and makes a significant contribution to irrigation."
All water from the first team pitches and the roofs is collected in a chamber and pumped back to irrigation tanks to supplement water from two on-site boreholes, which shut off at a certain level. The first third of all water used at the Centre is always recycled water.
At its Bulls Cross Training Centre, Tottenham Hotspur has a close working relationship with neighbouring Capel Manor College. Part of the negotiated arrangement with partners in the development of the site actually made this an obligation for the club, and it's something quite close to Darren's heart because he studied at Capel Manor twenty years ago. He recalls doing a tractor-mounted spray course there on a very clapped-out vehicle. Things would be very different now being next door to such prime facilities. Student groundsmen will get experience of working with equipment that's as up to date as you can get and see, at very close hand, how 5-star pitches are achieved.
"In the fullness of time, we shall be playing a direct part in the college's turf courses but, at the moment, its turf interests are based at Gunnersbury Park. When they do introduce them here, we will be very much involved and devoting time to help run courses and be very glad to do so."
Working at Bulls Cross for Spurs is much sought after. Darren tells me that, when a gardening position became available recently, there were over 350 applicants. It's not quite as tough as getting over The Chair and into the first team playing squad, but not far off it.
Transatlantic internships via the Ohio State University programme, and with the support of BUNAC (British Universities North America Club), are very much something that Darren has embraced. He's already welcomed two American turf students into his squad there. Recently returned to the US was Matt Lane, who spent much of last season working on the newly established pitches alongside the regulars, and getting involved in the renovation work close season, all done by the Spurs groundstaff with the exception of top surface Koro removal.
Darren pointed out that the club was properly vetted for this, as all companies are for such internships, to make sure students are not just used as additional cheap labour.
Despite all the pressure that life in football's Premiership brings, it is so apparent that Darren, and for that matter all of his squad. enjoy what they do. "It's a pleasure to come to work. I'm fortunate to have the most modern facilities there are at my disposal, but I do try to stay in touch with reality. There's only a small minority of us groundsmen that are so lucky and I have huge respect for fellow professionals working on a shoestring. It really makes me appreciate what I have."
"The environment here is something special, but it's important to keep your feet on the ground. Just to give you one example, Dougie Roberstson at West Ham and myself are lucky enough to be asked by the FA to judge the non-league Groundsmen of the Year Awards. It's such a breathe of fresh air, seeing what these guys achieve. We never stop learning from each other, you know."
