Secret Site of the World Cup Turf

There are no signs pointing the way to John Hendriks’s farm. Instead, having been told to turn left after the garage, we drive down a remote road lined with pine trees. It is deserted. Then suddenly we find it: a vast field of bright yellow-green turf. At this hidden location in the Netherlands, next to the German border, the pitch is being grown for the World Cup.

‘The grass is sleeping at the moment,’ Hendriks, a Dutch farmer, told The Observer yesterday, in his first interview with a British paper, as he gestured at the ocean of green all around. If England make it to the World Cup final in Berlin on Sunday 9 July, they will be playing on Hendriks’s grass. If England win, the Dutch farmer will have played a small but decisive role. Hendriks is supplying the turf for seven out of the 12 World Cup stadiums - including Cologne, where England face Sweden on 20 June in their most challenging group-stage match.

Hendriks refused to divulge which part of his 350 hectares (865 acres) contains the World Cup grass. ‘I’ve been sworn to secrecy by Fifa,’ he said. ‘We are worried that Dutch fans might trample on it because it’s going to Germany.’

His farm is virtually impossible to find, surrounded by muddy fields and woods at Heythuysen village, 20 minutes from the Dutch border town of Roermonden. His grass isn’t your ordinary lawn. It is a highly resilient mixture of two types - poa pratensis and lolium perenne - which he says guarantees the ball will move ‘very quickly’, facilitating bold attacking play. In football, this is vital. The grass influences how the ball bounces, how fast it comes off the pitch and the skills it favors. Barcelona complained last week about Chelsea’s pitch ahead of their Champions League clash. Liverpool struggled on a Wigan pitch strewn with mud. Will David Beckham be happy with Hendriks’s work?

‘The pretenses is the iron in the concrete,’ Hendriks says. ‘The second variety grows more quickly, which means the pitch can repair itself.’

The farmer planted the World Cup grass last April. After mowing and fertilizing for more than a year, he and his three brothers will harvest in May. Their biggest challenge is meeting Germany’s very strict grass standards. Fifa has its own Turf Competence Team who drop in periodically to check. Last week all 12 pitch-keepers met to discuss how best to maintain the grass. Among them was Alan Cairncross, the Scottish pitch-keeper at Berlin’s Olympic stadium, the venue for the final. ‘John has done stadiums all across Europe,’ Cairncross said. ‘The man is good. That means his grass is good.’

Hendriks shows me some of the grass. It’s not the World Cup pitch, but the same variety growing outside his detached brick house. I give it a stroke. It’s tough, springy, and reminds me of running around a rugby pitch at the age of 12. I contemplate stuffing some in my pocket.

Hendriks used to farm pigs and cows but in the mid-Seventies saw there was more profit in grass. Since then, he has laid pitches at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and in Russia, Turkmenistan and Iran. He met his Russian wife, Galena, last year, while laying a pitch.

Recently Chelsea expressed interest in buying a Hendriks pitch. ‘Beckham plays on my grass already. We do Real Madrid,’ Hendriks said. ‘He tested it with Zidane. They said it was very nice.’

GRASS CUTTINGS

• At Wimbledon a ton of grass seed and about 750,000 gallons of water are used on the courts each year.

• By the 1200s Britain was into lawns: ‘The sight is in no way so pleasantly refreshed as by fine and close grass kept short.’ (Albertus Magnus, 1260)

• A 10,000 square foot lawn will contain 8.5 million plants.