Blues CEO Mark Ashton says replacing the Portman Road pitch, the club’s big summer project, is well on track.
The playing surface was one of the first aspects of Town Ashton identified as needing improvement after he took on his role after leaving Bristol City in June 2021.
Initially, the plan was to replace it last year but with the building work to open up the south-east corner required before the refurbishment could take place, the Blues have had to wait until this summer for the first deep down pitch regeneration since the close season ahead of Town's FA Cup-winning 1977/78 campaign.
"The pitch is on track,” Ashton says with work set to start as soon as the season ends, although with the play-offs potentially causing a delay if the Blues are involved in them.
"It reduces it by 10 days,” he added. "It makes the window tighter, but it’ll be ready. It’s the summer project, you’re into millions of pounds for this project, not £1 million, millions.
"And that’s because the substructure of the pitch, how far we’ve got to dig down, you’re still no 100 per cent sure what you’re going to find when you do dig down.
"Three stands have been built in relatively recent years, but we’ve taken so many boreholes now and we’ve got a relatively good understanding of what we’re going to find.
"Undersoil heating is going in, that’s no mean feat. The whole new track is going in, which means there is levelling work to be done all the way around the pitch.
"We’ve had really good pitch designers in, it’ll be a hybrid pitch, back in the day they would have called it Desso, but that patent has gone, the manufacturers have done some world class pitches.
"It’s a big piece of work, but I think it will then set us in good stead for how we move forward.”
The work means there probably won’t be time for a Portman Road friendly this July: "Time is tight, pre-season home games this summer will be unlikely, I struggle to see where one would fit in, although I’m not going to write it off yet. But I think the reality is that every day is going to count to get that done.”
Ashton says the new pitch will give the club greater scope to hold concerts during future close seasons.
"The way they work in the summer is that each summer they come in and they take the top off,” he explained. "The bizarre thing is that if you see them do that, it still looks like the pitch is fully grassed because of the plastic.
"And the theory is that you could play on it like that. I wouldn’t want to, but the theory is that you could.
"But the answer to that is yes. If we tried to hold concerts on the current pitch, it’s a soil-based pitch and I think it would literally fall apart.
"The window you’d need to have a concert run to make the finances of the concert work, then the window to renovate the pitch, then the window for the pitch to regenerate, it would be very difficult. So this will give us some flexibility, that’s why we’ve broken through in the south-east corner.
"I think we’re in a position where we can hold concerts here, which would not only benefit the football club, but economically affect the community because the bars, the restaurants, the cafes, the transport, the hotels, everything would benefit.
"It really excites me that the football club is the shiny pin in the middle, the jewel in the crown that can positively impact the rest of the local community. I would hope you would have seen that our behaviours thus far are in line with that.”
Ashton says safe standing is something which will be looked at going forward but not for the 2023/24 campaign.
"It’s a difficult stadium, it’s not imminent, but as we put this estate strategy in place we’ll be looking at safe standing, railed seating.
"But what I don’t want to do is just dump that in an area without proper consideration - if I do it there, do I do it there? We need to consider the whole thing.
"And that comes at a cost. That wouldn’t be this year but it would be remiss of us not to look at that as we move forward.”