Ashford United spend £6,000 on repairs after 3G pitch fails inspection

Ashford’s 3G pitch failed its annual inspection - but the club have moved quickly to put things right.

The Nuts & Bolts were hit with a list of requirements after the artificial surface at Homelands was inspected on Friday.

Owner Don Crosbie said last night they were 90% there with the work, which has cost about £6,000, and assessors will return tomorrow, by which time repairs should be complete.

All being well, Ashford’s scheduled home game against East Grinstead on Saturday will go ahead as planned.

The Nuts & Bolts certainly hope so, having already had to postpone last week’s meeting with Sevenoaks while they awaited the initial inspection.

“They came down and gave us a list of about 14 jobs to do,” said Crosbie.

“The problem we’ve had is there’s such a shortage of test engineers - there’s only three in the whole country, which is ridiculous, and the firm that was doing it for the last five years weren’t accredited.

“They shouldn’t have been doing it but the FA have put them on the register for some reason.

“So we’ve got a build-up of probably five years’ work to do straight away.

“We’ve done 90% of it already. We’re trying to knock the rest of it off and hopefully that will be it if all goes well.

“It’s just things like levelling the pitch off and, evidently, the sprinklers have got to be covered these days, so it’s various things.

“I find it quite galling because our pitch was put down in 2015, these are new regulations, we shouldn’t be tasked with new regulations.

"It’s a bit like asking to put seatbelts in a 1933 Morris Oxford, it wouldn’t happen.

“But, at the end of the day, we don’t want to rub anyone up the wrong way, we’ll accommodate, we’ll do whatever we can.

“If they make life difficult for us we’ll argue