Easter Road Stadium has seen a great many changes and facelifts ever since Hibernian Football club decided to call it home in 1893.
These days, it’s a thriving home for modern football and our stadium is rightly considered up there with the best in Scotland. In recent seasons supporters couldn’t fail to notice the improvements being made to evolve the matchday experience even further.
Big screens, perimeter track LED advertising boards and a complete re-fit of our awarding winning hospitality suites have all been huge success stories for the club.
This summer we again made significant investments designed to help the club grow, even though most of those changes probably went under the radar of supporters.
HQ spoke to Garry O'Hagan, Head of Operations at the club, to take us through the new improvements made to the playing surfaces, floodlights and access systems along with the benefits being make to the overall matchday experience.
"This summer has seen the largest, single investment in playing surfaces that the club has made since we built the training centre in 2007." commented Garry.
"The Gordon family are keen to keep the club moving in the right direction and believe it’s important that when fans and players return after the summer there’s something in the club that has changed, and they can see a constant improvement in the club.
"The decision to renovate the pitch was made in the latter part of last season with the cooperation and backing of the football department. They’d been pushing for a better playing surface and in previous years the board had already invested through the provision of grow lamps.
"The major renovation of the pitch this summer and stitching of the surface is expected to give greater stability in the surface and lead to a better playing surface going forward.
"We opted to move to a hybrid pitch to do this and supporters should notice in the weeks and months to come that there’s less cutting-up or divots appearing on the surface.
"We’ve not only done this at the stadium, but also on one of the pitches at the training centre so that the players are training on the same quality of surface they’re playing on come a matchday. Having a better and more reliable surface should also help with the style of play we want to see at the Club."
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The renovation work started on the pitches at Hibernian Training Centre before the end of last season, with an extremely short timeline to complete the work before the start of the new campaign.
For Garry, his team and the contractors involved, this posed several operational challenges and ensured they were all kept extremely busy during the closed season.
The work at HTC started on the Monday ahead of the game at Tynecastle. Pitches one and two were removed from usage and the intensive renovations were started to ensure that when that these pitches were usable as quickly as possible in the preseason.
The football department saw the long-term plan. They realised they were going to get a better playing surfaces and were willing to take a short-term hit operationally so that we could achieve our goal.
"At times this was a bit like Challenge Anneka, if the readers are old enough to remember that! The season finished late because of a winter World Cup, pushing the season end back by two weeks. We then had an early start for preparation for Europe. When stitching a pitch you get one hit at addressing the irrigation and drainage before the stitching goes in and upgrades were carried out in what was already the shortest of summer windows.
"We had an exceedingly short window to make the changes required. From seeding the pitch at Easter Road to playing the first game was little more than six weeks. That’s an incredibly short time but given how aggressive the works we carried out were and then the indifferent weather we endured with periods of extreme heat and cold, prolonged rain and high winds, establishing the pitch in this timescale was extremely difficult.
"The pitch may not have been at the quality we wanted on day one however it’s now coming into its own and the quality of the surface is there for all to see.
"Having such a significant change in the playing surface means that we’ll need to look after it slightly differently. It requires different fertiliser programmes and different way of working.
"We changed groundsman last season with Steven Thomas joining us and at the start of this season brought in an assistant groundsman with the maintenance of the pitch moved onto a seven-day operation, to ensure the necessary maintenance is carried out when the pitch requires it.
The new coaching staff down at HTC are already raving about the quality of the surface already which is nice to hear."
To hear more about the developments at Easter Road, make sure you buy HQ Magazine!
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