News | Euro 2008 football: green-carpet welcome to teams with redexim machins

16 fev 2011
The European Championship Football kicked off on June 7, and is being played in 8 stadiums divided between Austria and Switzerland. All stadiums, with the exception of Geneve’s Stadium De La Praille, had brand new grass covers installed shortly before the tournament, in order to be sure that a perfect playing field was available for the players.

The stadium in Geneve had its existing playing field overseeded with the Speed Seed, a machine which is producing nearly 2000 holes per m2 for the seed to drop in. Immediately behind the Speed Seed, the soil was penetrated vertically by hollow coring tines installed on the Verti-Drain Mustang. Thus, the soil and the seed were brought to the surface of the field. This was followed by a drag mat, which pulled the seed and soil mixture into the millions of holes ensuring a maximum germination rate of the seed.

The stadiums of the Swiss capital of Berne and the Austrian city of Salzburg contain a carpet made of artificial turf. For the Euro Championships a brand new natural grass cover, costing around 500.000, was temporarily laid on top of it. Prior to the first games, the Verti-Drain Mustang is intensively used in order to establish the contact between the grassroots and the new humus subsoil to create a dense grass cover.
The Verti-Drain punches holes in the soil with long pins, which then make a cracking motion in the underground. Thus, grass roots can develop, and water is quickly absorbed in the soil and can drain away easily. The playing field becomes more elastic, limiting the chances of leg injuries, andusually resulting in more attractive games.Immediately after the last Euro game (of a total of 3 matches in each of the twostadiums) is finished the natural turf will be removed again.
The remaining five stadiums (Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Basel, Zurich and Vienna)removed the existing natural grass, and installed a brand new grass cover ofapproximately 3.5cm thick. This was then immediately followed by a treatmentwith the Verti-Drain Mustang with thin solid tines in 4 stadiums (Innsbruck,Klagenfurt, Zurich and Vienna). This in order to establish quickly the contact ofthe new grass cover with the underground.



Mr Walter Weiss is in charge of the grounds at the Ernst Happel Stadium in the Austrian capital of Vienna since 1976, venue of the Euro Final on June 29, 2008. He selected the new grass cover carefully, which was grown in an area in Slovakia containing soil features with extreme limiting effects of soil compaction. The turf is a mixture of grass containing approximately 15% of Lolium and 70% of Poa Pretensis (Kentucky Blue Grass) and sand was immediately brought on the turf after installation in the stadium with the Rink 1010 topdresser. For the Final mr Weiss will cut the grass as low as 25mm in order to give the ball extra speed. He uses the Verti-Drain Mustang model 7117 for many years on a regular base: “Especially when it rains, the water will drain away quickly. If during the Euro tournament it will start to rain, I will be able to use the Verti-Drain with small diameter 8mm thin tines anytime, so that the water will not stay on the surface”.