In professional sport teams and individuals strive for any advantage they can find within the Laws of the Game.
Anything that can give you a small percentage advantage in a match is to be cherished and worked on.
When you are at the bottom of the league it is even more important, relegation brings a multitude of issues from pay cuts to redundancies, in Scotland dropping into the Championship will generally take at least £1m off turnover, Ann Budge will probably find three or four times that figure missing from turnover this season.
Whenever Brendan Rodgers was due to take his side through to Tynecastle Craig Levein liked to give his groundsmen the week off with no regulations in place in the SPFL for the height of grass.
Without a league win since October 31 Motherwell went into today’s match against Steven Gerrard’s side sitting in bottom place in the SPFL Premiership.
Rather than strive for an advantage with the pitch at Fir Park in poor condition someone inside Motherwell opted to email prior warning to Gerrard so that his team could be better prepared for today’s match.
After the 1-1 draw the Ibrox boss told The Sun:
We got an e-mail from Motherwell a few days ago talking about the standard of the pitch. It was just to give us an early indication about it, say that if the weather turned we could have an issue, and also to say Motherwell had had to use it to train and it wasn’t in the usual condition.
The pitch here is normally fantastic. So it was a heads-up that if we had a period of weather that was bad the game could be 50-50. Thankfully the game went ahead but we appreciated the contact.
Ibrox Managing Direction Stewart Robertson is a former Motherwell director.
In pre-season Motherwell delayed the kick-off in a friendly at Ibrox as the home side waited on getting test results back. Earlier in the day a squad of untested players took on Dundee United in a friendly at Murray Park.
? ‘We got an email from Motherwell about the standard of the pitch.’
Steven Gerrard lays no blame at Motherwell’s door for the state of the Fir Park pitch in his side’s 1-1 draw.
– @ArnoldClark pic.twitter.com/YuZhZ5OBTQ
— PLZ Soccer (@PLZSoccer) January 17, 2021
