“I’ve just moved house to a nice little village,” Andy Ward says. “Ideally I’d just get a few mowing jobs. That’s all I really need now. I don’t want to go back into cricket. After 40 years, that’s enough for me. I just want to have a bit of time. I want to enjoy summer.”
You may remember 1985 as the summer of 19 by Paul Hardcastle and Frankie by Sister Sledge, of A View to a Kill and the Breakfast Club. Live Aid raised £40m for famine relief. Boris Becker, aged just 17, sensationally won Wimbledon. A loaf of sliced white bread cost about 40p, a pint of milk 23p, a litre of petrol 43p. England won the Ashes 3-1 and a ticket for a decent seat at Lord’s to see them do it cost £9. And it was in 1985 that Ward, like Becker aged 17, joined the ground staff at Leicestershire’s Grace Road as a trainee. This summer, for the first time in four decades, he will not be there.
“I just drifted into it,” Ward says. “It was a difficult time to get a job as a school leaver back then. It was a placement I went on which I really enjoyed. Just being outside. I never wanted to work indoors. It wasn’t until a few years later, probably when I became deputy head groundsman, that I thought, ‘Yeah, this is the job for me.’ As a kid it was just a way of getting money to go out.”
Ward became deputy head groundsman in 1997 and head groundsman in 2009, a position he held until his early retirement last November. “I’d been thinking for a while, trying to do the maths,” he says. “I thought 40 seasons was a good time for me. I’ve got a good lady in my life who was encouraging me to see that there’s more to life than preparing pitches. I wasn’t enjoying the job as much as I used to as well, which I was conscious of. It’s nice to have the pressure off. It became very stressful, the job.”
There were good times. The County Championship wins of 1996 and 1998 (“The best time at Leicestershire I’ve ever had. The team were brilliant. Everything was fantastic”), T20 Cup successes in 2004, 2006 and 2011 (“A little county like Leicestershire winning the T20 three times, that was amazing”), Australia praising the facilities during a warmup match at Grace Road before the 2005 Ashes (“That team, with that calibre of players, loving the pitches, that was brilliant”).
“I loved the outdoor work and it’s a bit of a feather in your cap to be in professional sport,” Ward says. “People are actually impressed by that. I used to enjoy cricket. Less so as I got older. I’ve seen too much cricket. After 40 years, I’ve had enough of it.”
Over time, the season has stretched and warped. In 1985, the first County Championship fixtures started on 27 April and the last finished on 17 September. This year, it starts on 4 April and ends on 27 September, more than a month of extra cricket, into which more fixtures in more competitions and involving more teams are squeezed. In Ward’s final season, the first game at Grace Road (predictably abandoned because of poor weather) started on 19 March.
“It’s totally changed,” Ward says. “It used to be more fun. It got to the stage where the season was just too long for me. We used to work weekends from February right the way through to the end of the season. And then we’d have so much time off in the winter when everyone else was working. It made it difficult for families.
“It’s a tough balance and it’s only getting worse. We’re the only groundsmen in the world who are preparing pitches in frost, snow, ice – we go through everything in this country. It takes six or seven weeks just to get a pitch anywhere near ready. March cricket is just ridiculous.
“The pay isn’t great. The hours are long. We had a really good apprentice last year, Dan. He left about the same time as me. Gone to work for a university. It’s more time off, more money. People dip their toes in, you know, have a little look at it, and then think, ‘Do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life?’
“Four-day cricket for me became such a grind. It’s 12-hour days and a lot of the time you’re doing it for 200 or 250 people. You’d get home about half eight and you’re up at dawn the next day. I won’t miss four-day cricket whatsoever.
“I spoke to Craig [Harvey] at Northants the other day and he says, ‘You get to mid-season and you’re just running on empty.’ There’s a lot of hours people don’t see. A lot of unseen work. And not having a break – I was guilty of that.
“A lot of head groundsmen are quite controlling. I didn’t want to take any time off, felt I had to be there. I always try to encourage the younger head groundsmen to take some time off during the season, but it’s such a difficult thing to let go.”
Ward was sustained by the camaraderie among a close team at Leicestershire and by a WhatsApp group where the nation’s chief groundskeepers share not just personal problems but professional solutions, nursing each other through advances in sports turf technology. Three times he returned from the Grounds Manager of the Year Awards, the Grounds Management Association’s big annual get-together, with a trophy and another four with commendations, most recently in November. At which point, he decided to go.
“I’d been away on holiday. I had a good think about it and I handed my notice in,” he says. “It was a very strange feeling. A lot of relief and joy, but then you feel lost for a bit.
“I’ve been back a couple of times. You work somewhere for 40 years and then you pop back in and even though no one made me feel like an outsider, I felt I was. Just little things, like I always had my own seat there, and someone’s in my seat now.”
So to Ward’s first summer of freedom (but for occasional mowing jobs) since he was a child. “I booked a month in Greece for the end of May,” he says. “We like going on walks and picnics, so we’ll do a lot of that. And I’ll go and watch some T20, see the lads. I won’t watch any four-day cricket, though.”
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