The man responsible for Aston Villa’s green, green grass of home

Nov 19 2009 by Mathew Kendrick, Birmingham Post

Such has been the improvement in Aston Villa’s home form this season that most of the Villa Park crowd have finally stopped watching matches peering through the gaps between their fingers.

All but one of them, that is. Jonathan Calderwood.

Calderwood is the head groundsman at Villa Park and the Bodymoor Heath training complex and, while the adopted Villa supporter has been just as impressed as anyone with the claret and blues’ revival in B6, he confesses he is more interested in how the pitch, rather than the team, performs.

Last season Villa struggled to win in front of their own fans. Their away record put their home results in the shade.

However, this term it’s role reversal. Martin O’Neill’s men are finally prospering on the green, green grass of home and it’s no surprise given that Calderwood has just scooped the Institute of Groundsmanship’s annual ‘groundsmen’s groundsman’ award.

It is the latest prestigious pat on the back for the amiable Irishman, who is renowned as one of the best in the business despite the setback of losing his job as Wembley deputy head groundsmen when the old national stadium was demolished nine years ago.

Not that the honour makes him a more relaxed spectator on matchdays at Villa Park.

“I love going to the away games!” smiles Calderwood.

“When they are at home, I don’t settle. You are anxious that someone might slip over. Is the pitch too wet or too dry? Is it the right height?

“You are on edge all the time. It’s like anyone’s job. You miss half the game because you are looking at the pitch. It sounds quite sad!

“There’s so much money involved and one little slip or one bad bounce can make all the difference.

“Years ago people probably accepted sub-standard pitches. A bobble was just one of those things. But now, with Sky TV, there are cameras everywhere and it’s being watched worldwide.

“I have friends that have gone into the industry who are working all around the world and you get people texting you from the Bahamas saying the pitch looks great or something like that. They’re all watching, but I never get to see their work!”

Calderwood might have been watching from across the globe himself had he accepted an offer to become the turf Prince of Bel Air with a sabbatical in Los Angeles. For the boyhood football fan, however, the grass was never going to be greener on the other side of the pond, especially when the chance arose to work down Wembley way.

“It’s all I’ve ever done,” says Calderwood, who has been a groundsman for 13 years. “There’s a team back in Northern Ireland called Glentoran. That’s my club. I was groundsman there.

“I went there on a week’s work experience while at school and they offered me a full-time job at the end of it.

“I left to go to Preston University and did a Higher National Diploma in Sports Turf Management and Golf Course design.

“As part of the course I had to do a six-month placement and I went to Wembley. At the end of it you are supposed to do another six-month placement and I was lined up to go to LA Country Club in Bel Air.

“But the day before I was due to fly out, Wembley rang me and said they had lost their deputy head groundsmen to FC Copenhagen and asked if I would take a full-time position.

“I love my football and, while it would have been nice to have gone out to Bel Air, I could have come back and been struggling to get a job.

“Having Wembley on your CV is fantastic. I haven’t done an interview for a job since!”

Villa Park’s lush surface and the replica pitches at Bodymoor are testament to the expertise of Calderwood and his team of groundstaff, because, despite the advances in pitch maintenance techniques, their work remains an art form.

“It’s alright when the pitch is good, but when it’s bad it’s a nightmare,” he explains. “Technology is improving all the time and the pitches are getting better.

“I wouldn’t say they are necessarily easier to maintain, they are getting more complicated.

“The old pitches used to be soil-based so it was easier to grow grass into the soil. Now they are sand-based pitches. The pitch at Villa Park is 99.9 per cent sand.

“Trying to grow grass on sand should be impossible but, with the techniques that we’ve got – fertilisers, ultra-violet lights – we can make it happen.”

Calderwood is rightly proud of his latest award, even though the 31-year-old clinched a similar accolade during his previous employment with Wolverhampton Wanderers at Molineux.

“In 2002 I was at head groundsman at Wolves, Aston Villa and Tranmere Rovers,” recalls Calderwood.

“I worked for a London-based company called Sports Turf Maintenance. They had the contracts for all of these clubs.

“In 2002 I won groundsman of the year at Wolves and then the year after that Villa approached me and said would I leave that and come and work for them full-time.

“There are two awards. There’s a Premier League award, I came runner-up in that in the summer, Arsenal won it.

“This one here is the Institute of Groundsmanship, it’s the IOG. It’s like a players’ player of the year, except for groundsmen. It’s open to all the clubs in the league.

“I’m in charge of Villa Park and Bodymoor Heath. We are responsible for 13 pitches in total. The other one is more of a pitch award, this one is more personal. It’s about what you as a groundsman do overall.”

Calderwood hails from Clough, County Antrim, just 12 miles from manager O’Neill’s village of Kilrea, in County Coleraine, and although he was originally drafted in by one of the current boss’s predecessors, he has quickly learned how to please his fellow Ulsterman.

“I first came to Villa when Graham Taylor came back for the second time as manager and he changed things around and brought me in,” he adds.

“Now we’ve obviously got Martin O’Neill here.

“He does tell me what to do with it, but we know what he wants now. We don’t change it for any specific games.

“He likes it short and quite wet and tries to promote fast, quick football and that’s what we aim for.

“I support Villa now, but I’ve still got a soft spot for Wolves. It’s the first result I look out for – after Villa’s!

“Wolves was the first head job that came up.

“It was just coincidence really. I had no allegiances to Wolves prior to that. Head jobs in football don’t come up very often. A lot of people stay in them for years.”