I don't know how often other clubs do this, but I'm surprised we now seem to do ours every year, we never used to (though Wembley do it every four months). It's also only out of season for football, it's still the rugby season.
Yeah seems a waste when it's likely to replace the damage done by RL, which will just rip up the new pitch. I think most teams re-lay their pitches every year though.
I don't think puffby league does any damage. It's not like rugby. No scrums, no mauls, no rucks, no contesting the ball at all to dig in and churn up the pitch.
Isn't this just the same as they did last year? Not actually relaying the pitch but spreading some sort of sand mix over it.
They still dig into the ground when tackling, it's why the turf on grounds that share with other codes need more maintenance.
I can't stand rugby league either but it's still true. Their studs do more damage than football players.
Actually I remember reading quite an in depth look into the difference in damage football and rugby does a couple of years back and football was the worst by some margin. Two of the key points I remember are football being localised with players spending most the game in their part of the pitch rather than spread across and moving up and down evenly, the wings and goal areas in particular being the worst affected areas. And the two worst actions for ripping up the surface being sliding and sudden changes of speed/direction at speed which rarely happen in rugby but happen all the time in football. I'll try and find it in the morning after I've woken up again as it was a good read, I did post it on here at the time.
Football does cause most damage - FACT. However this has resulted in peanut-hugging fans now claiming that their sport causes no damage. They are a weird lot when it comes to FACTS. The most significant element is that it is played on every single weekend and midweeks without the usual 2 week break. If it was football, rugby, hockey, tennis or polo played on it every weekend it would cause significant damage.
Part of the problem is the optimum grass length for football being shorter than that for RL. Therefore when RL is played on shorter grass more damage is done this contravenes the FACT that when both played at optimum lengths football is more damaging.
I'm surprised to hear that football causes more damage given in League they slide on the ground at try lines and will have a lot of tackles taking place at those ends of the ground as teams try to push players out of end zones. All I know is that here in Aus there's a lot of issues when there's League played on a ground the day before or on the same weekend as a football game given the state of the pitch. Wasn't there similar criticism after our Watford game because the pitch was used the day before by FC?
