Southampton Evening Cricket League has begged Southampton City Council to finally listen to their pleas and improve ‘disgraceful’ pitches and parks that they are given to play on.
League officials say they have been complaining to Southampton City Council about a long list of problems at certain venues for over a decade, with Hoglands Park being one of the worst.
Their concerns have been about dangerous wickets and outfields, poor quality turf and anti social behaviour.
Southampton City Council responds to the complaints of the Evening Cricket league by saying: “We are enforcing our grounds men to carry out a lot more work on the cricket tables this coming season and hopefully this will improve the situation.”
The several complaints from the Southampton Evening Cricket league have left Southampton City grounds men fed up ‘with the blame put upon them.’
Hoglands Park grounds men, Grant Gifford feel they are being wrongly targeted: “The public are to blame, we clean the fields every day and maintain the open space area. However when we come to clean the next day the field is trashed with litter, the turf has been ruined by motorbikes or by people having bbq’s or bonfires. Our job never ends and is stress full when abuse is aimed at us.”
Gifford explains how disheartening the job is: “We clean it and then it’s trashed. We have been physically attacked by members of the public and negative abuse aimed at us. It’s unfair that the blame is placed on us, we are skilled greens men and we just try to do a job and it’s made very hard for us because of certain members of the public. Their needs to be more rules set out on what you can and can’t do within the grounds.”
The council have addressed the problems occurring in the park and have responded by saying: “With the park being in the centre of town and very popular we do have a problem with litter etc. We have asked the police and the City patrol to pay particular attention to this area and to challenge any anti social behaviour that they see. We have also asked our staff to report any problems so that we can monitor the situation.”
It is hoped that Hoglands Park will be able to hold full cricket games and event fixtures this year.
Ewen O’Brien for Solentspeaker.co.uk
