MARK Jones will still be manically checking his many weather apps in 2017/18 but the Rodney Parade head of operations is confident the new £750,000 surface will avoid the need for nerve-racking pitch inspections.

The Welsh Rugby Union bought the historic ground this summer and work started on improving the surface at the home of Newport RFC, the Dragons and Newport County at the start of July.

The finishing touches are being made to the new drainage network – the old one was full of silt and debris – and the 1.2-metre wide rolls of turf are ready to be shipped over from Holland.

The new surface will be laid around August 10 with the specialist contractors, Hewitts, leaving on August 19.

The pitch, which will also have an artificial surface surrounding the playing area, hosts two games the following weekend with Newport County entertaining Chesterfield and Newport RFC hosting traditional foes Cardiff.

From then head groundsman James Stuart and his assistants Jon Raymond and Nick Delahay take centre stage, with the new developments giving them a fighting chance after coming up against flooding.

“It’s still going to be a huge challenge but it will allow the ground staff to come in on a daily basis and work on the playing surface,” said head of operations Mark Jones.

“What we had last year was them turning up in the morning to a waterlogged surface with puddles all over it.

“They couldn’t work on it and had to wait until the water had drained away before they were able to do something. This year there won’t be standing water and they will be able to work every single day.”

The hectic fixture list means that it’s inevitable the Rodney Parade pitch won’t be winning any beauty contests come April.

However, there should no longer be the feeling of dread on grim Saturday mornings that led to supporters, players and officials waiting for news about pitch inspections.

“I’m fairly confident we will avoid frantic Saturdays now, we might not look pretty but we will probably look green,” said Jones.

“There might not always been grass but there will be fibres and the pitch will be free-draining, which will give us a consistent surface.

“You shouldn’t see big divots flying out of the turf because of the reinforcement system with hybrid fibres holding it all together.

“But we are still mindful of the fact that we are the only stadium in Britain that hosts three teams and the fixtures don’t come to us like we would put them on the calendar.

“Sometimes there are three on the same weekend. That’s a huge challenge and it still will be going forward.”

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Jones is ever the realist, keen to manage expectations about the new surface in order to prevent his ground staff copping flak on social media and from the away changing room.

“I am protective of them because they do an amazing job with very little budget,” he said.

“One of the reasons I am so protective of the ground staff is that if there was a turf maintenance manual, at Rodney Parade you would have to rip it up and throw it in the bin.

“We have been working with budgetary constraints for a number of years and we would have loved to have installed something like this when we embarked on the business model of three teams at Rodney Parade. Unfortunately we couldn’t do that but now we are going into something special, I think.

“When you install a hybrid field like this, it does come with added costs. There is budget for additional fertilisers, feed and everything that goes with it because a hybrid field like this is laid on sand that doesn’t hold as many nutrients as soil.”

It’s not just the pitch that will have a revamp before both County and the Black and Ambers kick off their campaigns on the last weekend of August.

The stadium will profit from a bit more TLC and the hospitality boxes at the southern end of the ground, which had seen better days, are currently being demolished.

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Catering facilities will be provided in their place, including amenities for the away supporters at football, while Jones has a to-do list of 104 jobs and a budget to steadily work away at them.

“For now it’s getting everything up to a decent standard and people will see improvements and it will feel nicer,” said Jones.

“We haven’t been able to do that in the past and you didn’t have to be painting and decorating expert or a structural engineer to see the parts of Rodney Parade that were feeling a little bit sad for themselves and they will have a new lease of life.”