“I’ve just moved house to a nice little village,” Andy Ward says. “Ideally I’d just get a few mowing jobs. That’s all I really need now. I don’t want to go back into cricket. After 40 years, that’s enough for me. I just want to have a bit of time. I want to enjoy summer.”
You may remember 1985 as the summer of 19 by Paul Hardcastle and Frankie by Sister Sledge, of A View to a Kill and the Breakfast Club. Live Aid raised £40m for famine relief. Boris Becker, aged only 17, sensationally won Wimbledon. A loaf of sliced white bread cost about 40p, a pint of milk 23p, a litre of petrol 43p. England won the Ashes 3-1 and a ticket for a decent seat at Lord’s to see them do it cost £9. And it was in 1985 that Ward, like Becker aged 17, joined the ground staff at Leicestershire’s Grace Road as a trainee. This summer, for the first time in four decades, he will not be there.
“I just drifted into it,” Ward says. “It was a difficult time to get a job as a school leaver back then. It was a placement I went on, which I really enjoyed. Just being outside. I never wanted to work indoors. It wasn’t until a few years later, probably when I became deputy head groundsman, that I thought: ‘Yeah, this is the job for me.’ As a kid it was just a way of getting money to go out.”
“The pay isn’t great. The hours are long. We had a really good apprentice last year, Dan. He left about the same time as me. Gone to work for a university. It’s more time off, more money. People dip their toes in, you know, have a little look at it, and then think: ‘Do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life?’
“Four-day cricket for me became such a grind. It’s 12-hour days and a lot of the time you’re doing it for 200 or 250 people. You’d get home about half eight and you’re up at dawn the next day. I won’t miss four-day cricket whatsoever.
“I spoke to Craig [Harvey] at Northants the other day and he says: ‘You get to mid-season and you’re just running on empty.’ There’s a lot of hours people don’t see. A lot of unseen work. And not having a break – I was guilty of that.
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“A lot of head groundsmen are quite controlling. I didn’t want to take any time off, felt I had to be there. I always try to encourage the younger head groundsmen to take some time off during the season, but it’s such a difficult thing to let go.”
Ward was sustained by the camaraderie among a close team at Leicestershire and by a WhatsApp group where the nation’s chief groundskeepers share not just personal problems but professional solutions, nursing each other through advances in sports turf technology. Three times he returned from the Grounds Manager of the Year Awards, the Grounds Management Association’s big annual get-together, with a trophy and another four with commendations, most recently in November. At which point, he decided to go.
“I’d been away on holiday. I had a good think about it and I handed my notice in,” he says. “It was a very strange feeling. A lot of relief and joy, but then you feel lost for a bit.
“I’ve been back a couple of times. You work somewhere for 40 years and then you pop back in and even though no one made me feel like an outsider, I felt I was. Just little things, like I always had my own seat there, and someone’s in my seat now.”
So to Ward’s first summer of freedom (but for occasional mowing jobs) since he was a child. “I booked a month in Greece for the end of May,” he says. “We like going on walks and picnics, so we’ll do a lot of that. And I’ll go and watch some T20, see the lads. I won’t watch any four-day cricket though.”
