With football and the wider sporting world currently suspended due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, club officials have decided to provide manager Darrell Clarke and his team with an improved playing surface following a lengthy spell of issues.
Clarke had opted to switch training from Essington to the 4G pitch behind Banks's Stadium during the second half of the season after he deemed the training pitches to be unusable following a spell of less-than-helpful weather.
Speaking during last week's internal Zoom conference call with Chairman Leigh Pomlett, CEO Stefan Gamble and first-team manager Darrell Clarke, Dan Mole confirmed that the pitch was being worked on by the ground-staff.
He said; "The exec board spoke with Darrell about what we’d like to achieve, both at the stadium and at the training ground before Covid-19.
"That plan is very much different to the plan that we have in place now. Work is taking place at the training ground and the stadium as we speak.
"We have gone about a renovation process of the pitch, simply because we weren’t sure when we will have this opportunity again.
"We’re at a point in time where we can almost guarantee five or six weeks without football, bearing in mind that we started the renovation project a couple of weeks ago.
"We thought, if there’s the possibility of a quick return to football, a smaller pre-season or even back to back 19/20, 20/21, will be get the normal eight weeks that we need to completely renovate the pitch?
"The answer is probably no so we’ve taken the decision to start the work early. There’s been some excellent work done by our ground staff and third party contractors that come into the stadium.
"They’ve scarified the surface, reseeded and we’re regrowing the pitch so whenever football does return we will have a new playing surface which will see us through to the pre-season of 2021.
"Work is ongoing at the training ground, the one positive of not being there is that it’s given us the chance for those pitches to regenerate a bit naturally.
"We are committed as a club to do some work at the training ground over the pre-season of 2020, whenever that may be."
