HERE’S an interesting story I heard of Mayor Edgar Labella and the Cebu City Sports Center (CCSC) pitch. A few months back, just weeks after winning the election, the mayor started his day jogging at the CCSC oval. He saw one guy working at the field, picking up trash.
After circling a few times, he finally stopped and asked the guy why he was alone and asked him to call his supervisor.
“Gipangkasab-an tanan. Ngano usa ra daw nagtrabaho,” a coach told me. And I guess that explains why during our SunStar Football Cup, an army of CCSC workers descended on the grandstand every match day to clean the area. That didn’t happen before. And the CCSC has to, since compared to former mayor Tomas Osmeña, Labella regularly jogs at the CCSC and sees its state.
The guy that Labella saw that morning is one of the hardest working at the CCSC and treats the field as his baby. He even sings and talks to the field while he waters it. Heck, during our tournament, he was already watering one side of the pitch while we weren’t even finished. That’s how much he takes his job seriously.
Do you see those flocks of pigeons that have made CCSC their home? He feeds them out of his own pocket? Aside from the pleasure of having pets, the pigeons help the grass by fertilizing it with their excrement. That’s out-of-the-box thinking on how to do one’s job properly with meager resources.
However these days, he and the rest of the football community can’t bear to watch his baby. It’s December and we all know that it will lead up to the Sinulog. It’s the time when that massive Sinulog stage is set up and stays for at least a month, killing the grass.
But what if we can kill the pitch properly and give it a proper rebirth also come January? I know the people in charge of putting up the field try to minimize the damage, but what if they don’t have to? At this stage, there’s nothing to preserve and with an uneven service and a hodgepodge of grass types, I think it’s even advantageous to just kill all surface the grass in the pitch.
Come January of course, is giving it a proper rebirth, which also means leveling the field. They can use a compactor if they want to and after that of course is to plant just one type of grass for the whole pitch.
Will this be expensive? Not really. There’s already an annual budget for the Sinulog stage. It’s just a matter of putting in a little extra so the city can use the same workers to kill the field properly once they remove the stage.
As for the grass and its maintenance, the CCSC pitch was the best in the country in 2012, when Cebu hosted its first Fifa friendly between the Philippines and Singapore.
The expense for that was around P200,000.That’s P100,000 less than what the city is planning to give as incentive for the Southeast Asian games gold medalist.
Surely the City can find P200,000 to P300,000 every January for the field’s proper rebirth? What happens in December before the Sinulog?
Well, what always happens. We kill the field.