Pitch allocation: plan your square for the season

Pitch allocation is the quiet skill of groundsmanship. Anyone can see whether a pitch was prepared well. Whether it was the right pitch, out of ten, for that fixture, in that week of the season, is invisible unless you got it wrong. A good cricket pitch allocation plan spreads wear, protects your best tracks for the games that matter, and makes sure no strip is asked to host a match it has not recovered for.

This guide is how to build one, whether your square has six pitches or fourteen.

Start with capacity, not fixtures

Before the fixture list touches the plan, know what your square can give.

Count the real pitches. A 12-pitch square rarely has 12 match pitches. The outside strips often run into the outfield fall, one may be a worn artificial neighbour, another may be your designated practice track. Be honest about which strips can host which standard of cricket.

Set a per-pitch match budget. Club convention is 3 to 5 senior games per pitch per season, with repairs between. Your soil, your fixture density and your repair standards move that number. Junior games cost a pitch less, and shorter junior formats (20 yards for under 11s, 21 for under 13s) can share strips senior cricket has finished with.

Know your recovery window. After a senior game, a strip typically wants 10 to 14 days of repair and regrowth before it starts preparation again. Prep itself takes 10 to 14 days (the countdown is its own guide). So one strip used this Saturday is realistically unavailable for about four weeks of Saturdays.

The rules of rotation

With capacity known, sequence the season. Three rules do most of the work.

Never neighbours back to back. Play on strip 4 this week and strip 5 next week and you have a problem: strip 5 needs watering during its prep while strip 4's edges are being repaired beside it, and last week's bowlers' follow-throughs are inside next week's outfield line. Leave a gap. The classic pattern walks the square in odd steps: 2, 4, 6, 8, then back through 3, 5, 7.

Protect the showcase tracks. Your best two or three central strips should be reserved early for the fixtures that deserve them: top-of-table games, cup ties, the president's day. Write them into the plan first and fit everything else around them.

Spread the boring wear. Friendlies, midweek games and juniors go to the strips that need using: the outside tracks, the recovering middles late in their rest. If the same three comfortable pitches host everything, by August you have three dead strips and seven pristine ones.

Build the plan when the fixtures land

The mechanics are simple enough on paper or a spreadsheet:

1. List home fixtures in date order, with format and team.
2. Reserve the showcase allocations.
3. Walk the remaining fixtures across the square using the rotation rules, checking each allocation against the strip's recovery window and its neighbours.
4. Mark the prep start date for every allocation, so each game's countdown appears in the diary before it is urgent.

Then comes the part paper is bad at. The league moves a fixture. A cup run adds two home ties. It rains for three weeks in June. Every change ripples through recovery windows, prep windows and the neighbour rule, and the plan needs rebuilding from that date forward. Most clubs quietly stop replanning by July, and the square pays for it in September.

A worked example

A 10-pitch square, 22 senior and 14 junior home fixtures. The skeleton might look like this:

Twenty-two senior games over eight usable strips is inside budget, with the two showcase tracks never asked to host more than three. The junior programme lives at the edges on shortened pitches. Nobody plays next door to last week's game.

Your square will differ. The point is that every strip has a role written down before May, which is also the only way a new groundsman can ever take the square over without starting from guesswork.

Keep the record, close the loop

The plan is half the value. The record of what actually happened is the other half: which strip hosted which game, how it played, what repairs followed. Next winter, that record is what tells you strip 7 takes four games happily while strip 3 fades after two. Allocation gets better every season it is written down, and autumn renovation gets targeted instead of uniform.

However you keep it, keep it. The clubs that struggle are not the ones with small squares. They are the ones where the whole plan lives in one person's head.