An act of sod

Only in Vancouver would a well-drained, well-padded and eminently playable synthetic turf field be naively covered by grass for a weekend to please the vanity of a touring European soccer team.

Only in Vancouver would the organization that paid for the exercise be surprised that it can sometimes rain very hard in Vancouver and cost it more when it has to cancel a league match.

Another day in the trying expansion life of the Vancouver Whitecaps, who are languishing in last place of Major League Soccer during a season marred by injuries, red cards and the futile replacement of coach Teitur Thordarson with Tommy Soehn.

The Whitecaps hired English Lawns of North Vancouver to spend 30 hours to install and 30 hours to remove 90,000 square feet of sod for the July 18 visit by FA Cup champion Manchester City. The field was supposed to be tested once in a real MLS match situation with a July 16 visit from Real Salt Lake, but that was scuttled almost two-and-a-half-hours before kickoff because the grass was waterlogged.

Granted, Vancouver is enduring an unusually rainy July (normally the driest month) and the July 18 game is a gift to season ticketholders, who are getting in for free. Whitecaps’ chief executive Paul Barber outrageously proclaimed on Team 1040 that scuttling the Real Salt Lake match had nothing to do with the upcoming Manchester City match, part of the Herbalife World Football Challenge exhibition series.

Instead of Real Salt Lake being awarded a win for its trouble, the game was not forfeited. It will apparently be rescheduled sometime later this season and tickets from July 16 will be honoured. (Whitecaps’ co-owner Greg Kerfoot is a member of the MLS competition committee. When commissioner Don Garber visited Vancouver in February, he noted Kerfoot’s influence.)

Certainly the traveling Real Salt Lake fans have a good case to ask the Whitecaps for compensation for their travel bills. The game did not happen July 16 because of an act of God. It didn't happen because of an act of sod. The match would have been played, as scheduled and on-time, on the regular Empire surface. When one travels to a soccer match, he or she has a reasonable expectation that it will take place. Soccer is not baseball, the great American game they don't play in the rain.

Here is a little bit of history.

Empire Stadium opened for the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games with a natural grass surface that remained until 1970 when 3M’s artificial Tartan Turf artificial product was installed.

The Vancouver Whitecaps played North American Soccer League games there from 1974 to 1983 on the surface, which could be best described as a green layer of felt over concrete. Bob Lenarduzzi cited the wear and tear from Tartan Turf when he finally got a hip replacement in early 2010. Players enjoyed rainy nights, because that meant no rug burn on the crowned pitch. A very noisy truck that everyone called the “squeegee” would go to work to suck excess water from the carpet before matches on rainy days.

Tartan Turf was good enough for Manchester City when it played at Empire in 1980 and 1981. Lenarduzzi fondly remembers scoring once in the Whitecaps’ 5-0 beating of “the Blues” in 1980. The next year, the clubs tied 1-1. (Among the many international clubs hosted at the original Empire was Italy's AS Roma, featured in this video.)

The stadium was demolished in 1992 and used as a parking lot until 2001 when Empire Fields got a new lease on life -- and a natural grass pitch -- to become home of community soccer and softball.

But the field follies were not over. That grass field was removed and replaced by an AstroTurf GT synthetic surface when the temporary Empire Field 27,683-capacity stadium was built in 2010. The FIFA-approved AstroTurf GT product is good enough for Major League Soccer and Canadian Soccer Association competitions. The Empire surface is awaiting FIFA’s two-star certification.

Though there is some concern that the “tire crumbs” used in synthetic turf fields may irritate players’ lungs and skin through prolonged exposure, such fields are not injury magnets.

“Risk of injury on third-generation artificial turf in Norwegian professional football” in the British Journal of Sport Medicine found that between 2004 and 2007 there were 526 match injuries on grass and 142 on artificial turf. The study concluded “no significant differences were detected in injury rate or pattern.”

Researchers found 17.1 injuries per 1,000 match hours on grass and 17.6 injuries per 1,000 match hours on artificial turf.

The Manchester Citys of the world go abroad to bolster their brand, promote their sponsors, sell merchandise, recruit players and increase the international TV and online audience for their league matches. But the demand to play on temporary grass over a permanent synthetic pitch is akin to the famous Van Halen demand for brown and only brown M&Ms. It is frivolous.

I can hear the cries of soccer snobs already, deriding me for ignorance and blasphemy. Don't waste your time. I prefer to watch and play the world's greatest game on grass, but I have no complaints about the latest generation of high-quality synthetic fields. Manchester City's visit is for a relatively meaningless, one-off exhibition game. It is not for a multi-game tournament and no trophy is at stake.

Until teams like the Whitecaps either pay to have natural grass permanently installed in their stadiums or stand firm on the playability of their high-quality synthetic turf, foreign squads will exploit their sucker hosts and get what they want. Even if it means doing something which is totally contrary to the 21st century push by governments to be sustainable and friendly to the environment.

It takes a lot of energy to grow all that sod, transport it, unroll it, roll it up and take it away after a soccer match.

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Manchester City shutout Mexico's Club America 2-0 on July 16 in San Francisco, where the game was played at the San Francisco Giants' AT&T Park baseball stadium. It's rather odd that the so-called "Blues" (who wore their red and black striped kit in the Bay Area) would schedule a 7 p.m. news conference with the Whitecaps at Burnaby's EA Sports complex on July 17.

Sunday night news conferences are exceedingly rare in an economically difficult environment where the media is already challenged by tight resources and deadlines. Only a few people in the world can pull off Sunday night specials with success; I refer to the famous Obama-offed-Osama announcement of Sunday, May 1, 2011.