His elaborate pitch designs led to him being dubbed ‘the Messi of Mowing’ but for Leicester City’s John Ledwidge his turf trimming masterpieces, including the club crest in the centre circle, were not a display of ego.
Until the FA decided they were hindering the referee’s assistants spotting offsides, the club’s head of sports turf and grounds and his staff produced an array of artistic agricultural architecture that had many fans talking about the designs.
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Ledwidge has even said that when he revealed his job to strangers on holiday they instantly remembered the elaborate pitch patterns during Leicester’s title-winning season.
“A lot of time it follows me around,” Ledwidge tells The Athletic. “Wherever I go people talk to me about our designs. As soon as you say what you do, they ask ‘are you the patterns guy? You guys do great patterns.'”
The mysterious men behind the mower was finally getting recognised but while Ledwidge admits they were showing off their skills, it wasn’t down to vanity or a need for personal recognition.
“That was the whole point of it, to get people talking,” explains the 36-year-old. “It got people engaged and therefore we can then hopefully try and capture the imagination of some of that next generation, or get people interested enough so they have a little bit more respect for what we do, or a little bit more understanding.
“The patterns and that artistic license have gone, but the legacy of those patterns still carries on. It wasn’t a vanity project, it wasn’t the John Ledwidge patterns, it was there to get people talking, and it worked.”
The reason Ledwidge, who became the youngest head groundsman in the country at Coventry City at the age of 23, wanted football fans to take notices was because of the desire to inspire young supporters to look at grounds-keeping as a viable career path within the game.
Like millions of youngsters, Ledwidge grew up dreaming of becoming a professional player. While standing on the West Terrace at Highfield Road cheering on his boyhood club Coventry, Ledwidge wanted to be out there on the pitch.
“By 13 I looked like Bruce Bogtrotter out of Matilda, I was quite portly as a kid,” he says. “Quite quickly I realised that I was never going to make it as a footballer.”
Ledwidge had no connection with gardening as a boy, but his dad suggested he write to the grounds manager at Coventry and volunteer to help out.
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“I said I had no idea what a groundsman is, but if it gets me on the pitch I will do it,” he recalls. “So I wrote the letter and then a week later he came back and offered me a few days in the summer holidays to help them out.”
The elaborate ground design at the King Power stadium before Leicester’s match against Everton in May 2016 (Photo: Nigel French – EMPICS / Contributor)Instead of killing bugs, Ledwidge caught one – grounds keeping.
“It is one of those industries that really gets under your skin,” he explains. “Once you step foot into the environment you think, ‘OK, I can work in football and not be a footballer, and there is still a genuine career path.
“From the age of 13 I volunteered, every waking minute I had.”
Volunteering led to work experience, which led to an apprenticeship and by the time he was 19 he was deputy head groundsman at Coventry, before moving on to work under highly respected groundsman Jonathan Calderwood at Aston Villa, who is now at PSG.
By 23 he was running the show back at Coventry and it was a steep learning curve, not only because of the off-field problems the club faced but also the multi-use nature of the Ricoh Arena meant dealing with the aftermath of concerts and maintaining a surface for 12 games of football in just eight days during the 2012 Olympics.
“That is one of my highlights of my career there, achieving that, but also one of the worst years in terms of the club’s demise,” he says. “It was a real rollercoaster, but I never regretted it because it taught me to appreciate things. I had to be versatile, manage budgets and motivate people.
“But I wanted to be in the Premier League by the age of 30 and at the age of 28 I had an interview at Leicester. Eight years later I am still here.”
Ledwidge is now promoting GroundsWeek, an initiative in the first week of March designed to promote the diverse work of groundstaff and inspire the next generation.
“We still cut grass and mark the lines out – that is still integral to the job, but that is just the icing on the cake,” he explains.
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“There is a lot of biology and microbiology that goes on to make a pitch as good as it is. We are scientists and agronomists, and we have to have an in-depth knowledge of what we are doing.
“You also have to have a touch of mechanics because of the machines we use. You have to understand how they can have a detrimental effect on the pitches if they are not maintained right. The guys in the academy can be doing anything from cutting the pitch right through to some of the guys will be in the lab with our seed doctors or analyzing some of the diseases, or there’ll be looking at different ways to fertilise.
“There is such a vast variety. Sometimes they could be talking to a coach, moving goals, preparing a pitch, marking out – everything is centred around making the football operation work.”
The groundstaff in football have never been more important because pitches have become integral to the performance of the team, the level of injuries and club finances.
“The Premier League is high profile and the pitch is the centre piece of that, viewed around the world”, he says.
That global audience was the reason Ledwidge used the King Power pitch as a canvas to display their talents.
These days Ledwidge spends most of his time in his office at Seagrave, managing large projects and budgets, as well as the 50-plus staff who tend to the 21 pitches at Seagrave, King Power Stadium and the women’s team base at Belvoir Drive.
However, he is still happiest when he is out on the pitches, with his cockapoo Harley chasing rabbits nearby, mowing the grass.
“There are no emails to deal with, I can just put my headphones in, listen to music or a podcast, rather than dealing with large budgets,” he says.
“That is my solace and happy place, on the pitch. I am just back where I was when I was 16.”
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