SYDNEY -- It was five minutes before the New South Wales Blues were set to take on the Queensland Maroons in the State of Origin rugby league match in front of 73,342 fans at Stadium Australia, and one man already had his head in his hands. FIFA's senior pitch management manager, Alan Ferguson, the person in charge of all 74 pitches at the Women's World Cup, couldn't believe what he was seeing.
The match ball was being delivered onto the turf by a fleet of motorbikes, cutting up all his hard work.
"You know, when I saw these five motorbikes coming out with the ball before the game, I thought, 'what are they doing to us?'" Ferguson told ESPN.
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The game took place just eight days before the 2023 Women's World Cup opener for co-hosts Australia against the Republic of Ireland in the same stadium on July 20. While FIFA usually requires a four-week grace period of exclusivity to get a stadium ready, it gave special dispensation for the rugby match to be held at Sydney's biggest stadium given the interest. Which then needed eight days of hard work from Ferguson and his team to get it up to standard for the football.
"It's big business, the concourses are full, the stands were full and we have to appreciate that and work with them," Ferguson said. "They're never going to knock Origin back -- not here. Business is business. But then we had that turnaround. I thought they [his team of workers] did a fantastic job to get the surface to the conditioning stage that they did.
"If I'm being honest in, in open terms, it was probably 80% to 85% of where we wanted it to be. But it was still good enough to get the first game in. Both teams thought so. But now it's really in cracking condition."
That's just one of the 74 pitches Ferguson must keep an eye on, in grounds spanning from the west coast of Australia to the bottom of New Zealand's South Island. Even in the middle of the night, he sleeps with his phone on loud just in case there's an emergency. But he wouldn't be doing any other job.
Ferguson has watched every second of this World Cup -- maybe not all of it live, but he's waiting for the moments when two players clash, someone trips, or the ball deviates. Essentially, anything that might suggest the surface is far from perfect.
"My eye is probably a split second behind the ball," Ferguson said. "Sometimes I change and I watch the ball coming into a player, but never watch the game as it's happening. You're watching the ball skip off the surface. Is it too wet? Is it too dry? Do I need to add some more water at half-time? Or have I added too much before the game?
"I've got my team of pitch managers in every venue. They're obviously watching their own games, and they have to give me a detailed report within two or three hours after the game so I know what's happened. So if there is an issue, say a player's been injured, [we have to work out] is it pitch related? Is it a contact injury? Yeah: I need to know that information fairly quickly."
Ferguson has been in this industry for 45 of his 63 years. He says he was born in Scotland but made at Ipswich's Portman Road. He joined Ipswich Town from Rangers in 1996 and over the space of 15 years, was named Groundsman of the Year. In 2011, he joined the English FA and took on responsibility for the St George's Park pitches, then in 2015, the Wembley pitch came under his purview.
He left England around 2017 and started to pick up consultancy work through his own company, Premier Sports Turf Maintenance -- soon, UEFA was knocking on his door, taking him from Turkey to Dubai and Kosovo for consultations. Ahead of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, FIFA put him in charge of six of the 12 pitches in Kaliningrad, Spartak, Luzhniki, Samara, Rostock and Saransk and then in 2019, FIFA appointed him to this role.
"There's only myself and one other guy full time, but we have what we call a wider group, which is internationally recognized pitch consultants, pitch builders, educationists, machinery suppliers, and we call that the Global Pitch Management Framework," he says. "Within that framework, there's a couple of really high-profile consultancy practices: one operating here is called 'Lab Sport.' The Australasia branch are doing our pitch management and monitoring for the last two and a half years. They would analyze the maintenance program, the available equipment, available staff and they'd report that back to myself."
As Ferguson puts it, the goal is to have each of the 74 pitches -- that number includes stadium pitches, training pitches and all available surfaces -- to have "billiard table" levels of smoothness.
Each is weighed up against a new uniformed range of standards that were confirmed just over a year ago. Previously each consultancy firm, FIFA and other governing bodies would have their own scoring system -- this new approach means there's consistency across the board, ranging from irrigation, to the standard of the field, to grass texture and depth. According to FIFA's regulations here, grass has to be between 23mm and 25mm high, with 23mm considered optimum.
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One of the chief challenges of this World Cup tournament was the season itself: though the temperatures are comfortable in Australia and New Zealand, it's still a winter competition and the weather can be unpredictable.
"It's been really challenging," Ferguson said. "We experienced some pretty stormy weather just over 12 months ago when we came down to a workshop in Sydney, there was flooding, there was heavy rain. We experienced it again in Auckland in February in the playoff tournament. There was a cyclone, and we knew we were going to run into some issues, so we mitigated against that. We worked with both met offices and lab support in Australia and New Zealand. We asked them for the last 10 years of rainfall records because we reckon that was the biggest risk to a game. They came back and highlighted Perth, Sydney, Auckland and Wellington as the highest risks out of the nine 2023 World Cup host cities.
"I went to management and said we're going to need to use rain covers in the tournament. There was a bit of a debate, I'm not going to lie to you because it's never been done in a World Cup, as usually they're summer tournaments. So we brought four covers over from the U.K., we had them in four cities, we've used them six times and they've been enormously successful."
Ferguson deals with what he calls "red flags."
"Going into a game, the weather's obviously the biggest game changer for me. We've got very accurate weather reporting, so if I see something, especially down here, where you get these big rain fronts coming across [and] anything that's shown more than 10, 12 millimeters [0.4 inches] in a 10-12 hour period would qualify as a red flag because at that intensity, even with a hybrid pitch here, if too much water falls in a short space of time, it's not going to be able to be absorbed into the surface, so you're going to end up with puddles.
"I came here in March to watch a match in Sydney and you had horrendous weather. When I got to the stadium, the puddles of water were still sat on the pitch. That's a red flag."
There are other aspects that give him anxiety. Take the dreaded nematodes, a parasite that attacks root structures on all-grass pitches. Though he's avoided that in Australia/New Zealand as they're almost unheard of with hybrid pitches -- which were first introduced as the standard surface for the 2019 World Cup -- he's aware of the threat they can pose to a pitch, like it did to Scotland's Murrayfield rugby pitch back in 2013.
"That's my worst nightmare: potholes on the Murrayfield pitch!" he adds. "As pitches have evolved and you use more sand, there are different species of nematodes in any sample of sand. The worst one is the root knot nematode because it eats off the roots of any plant, removing the anchorage. But luckily that's very uncommon and not something we've had to deal with."
There can also be unexpected visitors from the local wildlife. "We get issues with wildlife all over the place, more in the training sites," he says. "Those animals that dig: foxes, rabbits, squirrels, you name it. We've had some odd ones as we've done our travels around. When I was in Costa Rica, we had snakes on one training pitch, which I quite happily volunteered not to deal with. But yeah, some of the training sites are in the middle of nowhere. You're in the middle of a wild habitat, so you have to expect you're going to get some interference."
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Central to delivering these immaculate surfaces at this World Cup was the exclusivity period FIFA got, where the training pitches and stadiums were largely handed over to FIFA between four-to-six weeks before the tournament, allowing them control over the maintenance. "It's a standard thing we try and do, and in some countries we have to extend that," Ferguson says. "We just can't afford for them to look anything less than billiard tables."
Ferguson has based himself either in the FIFA HQ, or in his hotel room, where he keeps tabs on each of the 74 pitches. He gets frequent feedback from his team members, who raise any concerns both in-game and before and after the match. Even though they have a system in place, there are still some aspects of the sport that wind him up. During the Nigeria-England match, when England were awarded their first-half penalty -- one later reversed after VAR -- one of the Nigeria players tried to scuff up the penalty spot.
"I mean, gamesmanship has gone on down the years, and for us, it's a nightmare," he says. "Yeah. And there's nothing worse than preparing pitches like we are, and somebody goes up and scuffs a penalty."
However, overall, he's been delighted with how the tournament has gone: "You come in with an expectation, and my expectation is the stadium starts with a full cover of grass. That they're really well presented for fans in the stadium and for global television and for the players because everything we do is, is ultimately for the players. The footprint's been a huge test for us, but I'm really, really delighted and I could only congratulate the groundskeepers of both countries for eventually embracing the tournament.
"There's several examples I could give you: Lakeside in Melbourne, Jubilee in Sydney, Wanderers Football Park. These are fantastic surfaces. We still get grumbles, though: you have to come in with a little bit of an expectation that you have some challenges -- we had some issues with one in Melbourne in the six-yard areas but now, generally, I've been thrilled to bits."
Once this tournament finishes, Ferguson will head back to the family home in Stowmarket in the east of England just 11 miles from Ipswich. He arrived in Australia on July 4, so by the time he heads home, it'll be eight-plus weeks on the road. His garden will need some work, but not the grass.
"Here's the big shock," he says. "I've got synthetic grass. There you go. I'm never at home, simple as that. I would go back to grass 6-foot tall, not 6" tall. So yeah, some years ago I put it in synthetic and it's just easier to manage!"