The pitch has probes in it every few metres that read moisture and compaction, so the grounds team knows where the grass is being hurt. Every night at about ten the probes along the home touchline read compaction in a line. Two footprints' worth, moving, at a walking pace, from the mouth of the tunnel to the corner flag and back, and back, for ninety minutes, in the technical area, where a manager stands.
I am the deputy groundsman at a football club and the pitch sensors are the reason I sleep, and the reason I do not.
The probes.
A grid of sensors in the soil under the grass, reading moisture, temperature, and compaction, which is a probe pushed on from above. A player's stud on the surface shows as a small spike. A line of spikes is somebody walking. On a match day the grid is a picture of the game. On a night with no match it is flat.
At ten it is not flat.
The line.
Along the home touchline, in the technical area, which is the box painted on the grass in front of the dugout where the manager is allowed to stand. Two spikes, alternating, left and right, at walking pace, from the tunnel end of the box to the far end of it, a turn, and back. Up and down. For ninety minutes and a bit. Then to the tunnel, and gone.
It is a person pacing. The stride is a man's. The turns are the tight turns of somebody who has walked that box a thousand times and knows where the line is without looking, and there is a place, about a third of the way along, where the spikes stop for a few seconds every pass, which is where a manager stands to shout.
The grass there is the worst on the pitch. It always has been. I have relaid it twice.
What has been checked.
The probes, replaced along that line. They read the pacing.
The touchline, at ten, by me, sitting in the dugout. The grass in front of me moved. Not much. The way grass moves when a foot is on it, a small flattening, left, right, along the box, and back, and it stopped at the place, a third of the way along, and stayed flat for a few seconds, and I heard, from that place, a man breathing hard through his nose, the way a manager breathes when he is not going to shout and wants to, and then the grass went on.
Who.
I did not need the historian. Anybody who has been at this club for long knows. A manager, decades ago, the club's great one, who had stood in that box for years, and who had been sacked, and who had died the year after, and who had been, everybody said, a man who lived on that touchline and had nowhere else to stand.
He is standing on it. Every night. For ninety minutes. Managing a match nobody is playing, and by the sound of the breathing it is not going well.
What is done about it.
The compaction line is on the pitch report every night and the head groundsman has it down as a sensor drift and has asked me to relay the grass in the technical area again, and I have, and it was walked flat again within the week.
What I do.
I look after the grass.
A manager on the touchline has a fourth official beside him. That is the rule. A man in a suit with a board, whose job is partly to hold the manager back and partly to be somebody the manager can talk to who is not going to tell the press. Nobody has stood beside him for thirty years.
So I do. At ten I go and stand where the fourth official stands, at the tunnel end of the box, in my coat, with a clipboard, because it is what I had, and when the pacing gets to my end I say, all right, boss, which is what they say, and when it stops at the shouting place I say, easy, they've heard you, which is what they say, and at ninety minutes when the spikes go to the tunnel I say, unlucky, boss, and I go in after him.
The pacing has slowed. The stride is the same but there are fewer passes, and the stop at the shouting place is longer, and last week for the first time the probes read something that was not pacing, at about the seventieth minute, which was two feet together, still, at my end of the box, for a full minute, beside where I was standing, and I did not say anything, and neither did he, and I have decided that was a man leaning on the fourth official for a minute in a match he could not change, and that it was allowed.