The art of mowing a football pitch ...Middle East

ALLPAY PARK — Earlier this month, Joe Mecke-Davis posted a picture of his latest creation on social media. Mecke-Davis posts a lot about grass, grass seeds, grass designs and about looking after grass because, as he himself concedes, grass is a major part of his life.

was a drone shot of Westfields FC’s Allpay Park after Mecke-Davis’s latest pitch redesign and cut into style. His previous record was 300,000 views on an overhead shot but, by this week, the latest design had been viewed 1.1 million times and been covered on BBC News and Sky Sports. It is fair to say a 26-year-old non-league groundsman didn’t envisage becoming a viral sensation.

“My name has got out there a fair bit, yes,” he jokes as we stand at the side of the pitch near Hereford’s town centre. “During the last few pre-season friendlies, I’ve had people coming up to me and complimenting me on the pitch who I’ve never met before, which is lovely. They know me from the TV!”

In the thousands of replies Mecke-Davis received, many reached out because they didn’t know such pitch redesign was possible. From National League level upwards, clubs can only have continuous straight lines so that’s all you ever see on TV (“fun” designs were banned four years ago). But in the Hellenic League Premier, you can do what you like.

It is a hot, sunny Wednesday morning in mid-July and Westfields’ pitch looks immaculate, the exact shade of lush green that makes you yearn to take a penalty that you can imagine actually matters. At one end of the ground is a Bulmers cider factory. The vast shiny steel drums occasionally waft a new brew smell over the pitch. Let’s be real: this is the good stuff.

Here she is! My plan and the final result. Combined 2 of my favourite previous patterns to come up with this one. 2 weeks until first pre season game pic.twitter.com/zfCy8cg2yM

Allpay Park has the sense of being in a dip, with trees surrounding on most sides. It lies upon a floodplain that is the bane of Mecke-Davis’ professional life.

He hopes for only one flood per season. In 2024-25, this ground was under a metre of water on five separate occasions. This is a labour of love and both words deserve their own emphasis.

But the best view, obviously, is from the air. There you see how the central lines curve around the centre circle and how the two sides are filled in with diagonal dashes in four different directions. It’s like a sedative Etch-a-Sketch drawing.

The process is fascinating. Mecke-Davis is on the road a lot with his job (the company he works for, High Ground Maintenance, looks after many sporting grounds, of which Allpay Park is one), but he keeps a notepad on the passenger seat for the brainwaves. When he arrives somewhere, he will scribble a few lines and patterns.

“When I get home, I use a drawing app on my iPad,” he tells me. “I have an outline of a pitch and draw some patterns on it that I fancy. I’ll take bits out and add other bits at the design stage. I reckon only 25 per cent of the patterns I come up with end up being possible to actually put into reality.

“Then I’ll come down here with the design on my phone and try and visualise how I can see it coming together. With a pattern like we have now, you’re all over the shop on the mower: straight into the middle and around the centre circle; out to the far left for those dashes, far right for those dashes, back to far left to do solid stripes and then right side to do those. The first time you do it it is a bit mind-boggling.

“Once it’s in, you send up the drone. That is the bit that either makes or breaks your heart. At eye level, I can only get a sense of what it’s going to look like. You send the drone up and you see all your mistakes. Thankfully, I got this one right the first time.”

Some people might be unaware of how pitch designs work. After his viral post, Mecke-Davis got many messages asking if he had grass of different lengths or used a certain dye when mowing.

It’s simply a question of which way you mow the grass and thus whether the sun reflects off it (looks light to the eye) or is brushed towards you and doesn’t reflect (looks dark).

If you went to the other end of the pitch, the stripes would appear opposite. The grass then “learns” that position and grows in a certain way, so each new design takes several cuts to undo – imagine using a rubber on a pencil line.

Mecke-Davis does get paid for working on this pitch as part of his job, but that misses the point really. It has become far more than that, not just because of the pitch designs and the occasional tweet that raises major interest.

He uses a line early on in our chat – “And then I do my extra bits on evenings and weekends” – that quickly becomes clear is a ludicrous understatement.

“The water comes on at seven and goes off around lunchtime, so I come down every day and move that to its second position,” he says.

“I come down again at around five in the afternoon and move it to the third position. Then I come down around 10 or 11 at night to turn it off. And that’s just the watering. It’s pretty much a seven days a week job, but I want to make it look its best.

“You fall in love with it. I spend as much time down here as I can. It’s very much my baby. It’s so therapeutic. I just pop my headphones in, listen to some music and crack on; it’s my chillout place. And when there’s a fresh batch in the cider factory it smells lovely in the summer. Those are the days.”

There’s something very lovely about this story: a young guy doing extra time at a non-league football club because he loves his job completely.

Westfields have recently asked him to become an honorary vice-president of the club, something that Mecke-Davis considers an immense honour. He describes this place, where he started only four years ago, as more of a family than a club.

They must know how lucky they are to have him. There may be bigger offers at some point – some professional clubs have already been in touch. Mecke-Davis dismisses any of that talk with his hand – “plenty of time for all of that”.

For now, he is concentrating on creating videos that tell the story of how to do the job and giving out free advice to as many other groundspeople as he can. There are no secrets here, he says: “Let’s get every pitch looking like this one”.

“I know it’s a bit sad,” Mecke-Davis says, laughing. “It’s grass at the end of the day.

“But it’s amazing what a bit of grass, looking beautiful, can do for people. You’ve got the players and club officials all taking videos of it and smiling and sharing it with their mates.

“You’ve got thousands of people reaching out and sharing a picture of grass in Hereford so that millions see it.”

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I don’t think that is sad at all – I think that it’s art and I think that it epitomises the brilliance of non-league football – its depth, its dedication, its colour, its ingenuity.

A bloke with a notepad, and iPad and a perhaps unrivalled obsession with grass seed.

People like Mecke-Davis are the grassroots heroes that you don’t hear about enough. Literally, in his case.

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