Punjab's Predicament: the combination of factors that ruined Guru Nanak Stadium's pitch ahead of I-League

AFTER A MAJOR LOSS to East Bengal, Minerva Punjab managed to stage a turnaround of sorts by holding Churchill Brothers to a 0-0 draw in their second home game of season.

While the visible improvement in Minerva's gameplay drew some praise, the club received a lot of flak for flaws in the match organization; the biggest of which was the pitch. 

The Guru Nanak Stadium's football pitch, which has hosted a number of national and international matches in the past, was in a depleted state ahead of MPFC's first ever top division home game. Parts of the pitch was grassless, and there was a lot of sand used to fill up the puddles left by heavy rains that continued for days, causing those areas to be way harder than any professional venue should be.

The situation was so bad that stadium authorities were seen sprinkling freshly cut grass on the bald parts of the pitch just before Wednesday's match against Churchill Brothers kicked off; an attempt to mask the ravaged look of the pitch and provide some softness to the surface.

Ranjit Bajaj, the owner of Minerva Punjab, insists that this state of the pitch is the result of multiple mess-ups at various levels of management as well as rough weather. Speaking to TFG, he explained his predicament with the pitch,

"Ludhiana is not our home city. We're a club from Chandigarh and would have preferred to play out of there. But there was a problem with our ground over there not having bucket seats and because we just got 12 days to prepare for our top division debut we did not have enough time to install them. This has left us in a situation where we are practically playing 18 away matches this season. Our players are staying at a hotel in Ludhiana and we are unable to make use of any of our training facilities in Chandigarh. It also made it harder for us to monitor the conditions of our home ground for the season because it was far from our city and so much of our attention was focused on the team traveling to away games."

Meanwhile, the local stadium authorities were not helping either; with the ground given out for daily practices of the Republic Day parade. Ranjit said,

"We booked the ground ages ago and paid our rent. But the stadium was still given out for the Republic Day rehearsals and we had hundreds of people walking on the pitch day after day, which hurt the pitch a lot. And then before the Republic Day it started raining so hard they had to cancel the parade."

The heavy rain continued for days, stopping about two days before Minerva Punjab were to play their first home game against East Bengal, leaving the organizers little time to repair a pitch with heavily damaged grass and puddles all over. They had to resort to emergency measures like filling up the puddles with sand and using a roller to keep the surface even.

Ranjit acknowledged that the ground was far from being a good playing surface, especially for the top division league, but promised to have better conditions next season when they come in with enough time to prepare; and possibly play out of a newly refurbished home ground at Chandigarh.

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