Last week the Alton Town Council ground staff Verti-Drained the entire park including the pitch on Diggers. In fact, they Verti-Drained much of the areas we use most twice and the floodlit training area 3 times! That is a lot of holes - to drain away surface water and aerate the grass roots.

This week they are spreading another 180 tonnes of special sports sand on the areas we train on, to make sure we have the best surface possible for training this season. This will benefit the whole club, as we have also focused on where the juniors train between pitches 1&2, plus in front of the club house to try and reduce the muddy bog everyone walks through to get to and from games and training.

Getting this huge amount of sand into the many holes is the next step and for this they are using our new Quadraplay machine. This was purchased by the club with help from the RFF Groundmatch Grant Scheme. In fact, it is already in use as you will see from the photos taken this morning.

The Club would like to say a very big thank you to Earthline Limited of Farnham who have very kindly loaned a grab lorry and operator to enable the sand to be loaded much faster into the spreader. The difference is incredible and what took over two days last time will get done in a day for this phase.

So thank you to Steve Richardson, club member who responded to our call for help and set this up, Phillip Copplestone MD at Earthline who gave the go-ahead and finally Dave Gwinnett who has been operating the lorry today in Anstey Park. We really do appreciate your very generous gift to the club.

More photos of the work being done can be seen in our photo album HERE