North East sport faces challenges because of climate change

But what happens if your level playing field is underwater? Or dry, cracked and dangerous to play on during heatwaves?

What happens if that once-level playing field is slipping into the sea or in danger of being swallowed by swollen rivers?

Those are the questions increasingly facing sports across the UK as climate change begins to bite and awareness dawns that things are not quite like they were only a few, short years ago.

This week, a national campaign has focused politicians’ attention on the increasingly noticeable effects climate change is having on sports up and down the land.

Paul Merson took a break from the Strictly dancefloor to launch the Common Grounds campaign at the famous pitches on Hackney Marshes pitches, (flooded just a few days ago), and was joined by fellow sports stars calling on MPs to appreciate the impact on their own constituencies.

Sometimes national problems don’t seem like ours here in the North East.

Take Hackney Marshes for example - the clue is surely in the name, in terms of the problems it faces. And if you’re looking for professional football club grounds most threatened by rising sea levels, you’ll find them on the south coast, (Southampton and Portsmouth) in East Anglia, (Ipswich Town and Norwich City), and the Humber (Grimsby Town and Hull City).

But the climate warning signs are already here in the North East if you look closely enough and begin connecting the dots between the region’s sports.

The coast is an obvious place to start, and there you’ll find Alnmouth Village Golf Club and Hartlepool Golf Club under threat from coastal erosion.

At Alnmouth - the oldest nine hold links in the country, which has already lost land to the sea  - Storm Babet went on to take out half of its fifth tee green last year.

The community hopes repairs to the groynes which act as sea defences will help. But the increasing frequency of violent storms in the face of climate change poses a threat to much of the North East coastline.

At Hartlepool Golf Club plans for a major redevelopment of the 18-hole course were made due to the threat of coastal erosion.

The club unveiled plans to effectively create four new holes after club officials accepted several holes were at high risk of being lost to coastal erosion.

Both clubs have seen parts of their courses nibbled away by the waters. 

Being inland does not help either - just ask everyone at Corbridge Cricket Club, whose ground was underwater when it was hit by Storm Desmond and its clubhouse and facilities ruined. Neighbouring Tynedale Rugby Club fared almost as badly.

It’s not just individual clubs either, whole sports can be affected.

Take the world’s second oldest football league, for example, the Northern League, now facing up to new challenges.

Last season saw hundreds of games called off because of extreme weather and at one stage some teams were eight to ten weeks behind others.

(Image: Northern League)

League secretary, Kevin Hewitt, said: “There’s nothing new in games having to be re-arranged, it happens all the time with cup runs and so on, but last season was something else.

“On more than one occasion I was genuinely concerned whether we would be able to finish the season.”

Out of 842 Northern League games scheduled, over 500 had to be rearranged, and 304 of those were directly attributable to bad weather.

Having to rearrange more than a third of fixtures hit by extreme weather looked for a long time as though it might be too great a challenge for the officials

“When I look back at the email exchanges between myself and the Football Association there’s a danger of me getting PTSD,” smiles Kevin, ruefully.

Northern League secretary Kevin Hewitt (Image: Northern League)

“With each game postponed, there are officials to organise and re-organise, footballers who are disappointed and fans who might not be able to make the rearranged game.

“There were a handful of clubs that hardly played a home game between October and March. There are difficult conversations to have and sometimes it is not pleasant.

“Then the fixtures start to pile up if the bad weather continues and you’re looking at two and sometimes three games a week to keep the season moving on.

“That’s a real problem because you’d be reluctant to expect a professional footballer to play three games a week and in the Northern League you are talking about people who are holding down jobs and fitting in football in their spare time.

“And of course, there is increasing risk of injury in asking players to play so many games in such a short space of time.”

The Northern League takes in the Lake District where flooding is a greater risk than most places but last season, the three grounds close to each other with the most problems were Washington, Boldon and Jarrow.

“The Bermuda Triangle,” Kevin dubs it because the pitches spent so much time underwater. “Normally, Jarrow’s pitch is superb but it was regularly waterlogged and all three clubs had significant backlogs.”

In the end, with a huge amount of goodwill and effort, they managed to complete the season.

The Football Association eventually relented, giving the Northern League a five-day extension to the season but it was barely needed.

Kevin explained: “Teams played as many games as they could and the all-weather surface at Sunderland Ford Hub came to the rescue - sometimes we were playing five games a week there - but I don’t know if that would be an option this season, as we’ve now got two teams playing out of there.

“Not all footballers or supporters though are fans of all-weather surfaces and the point of the league is that your club is in the heart of your community and that’s where you want to see the games played.

“I think investment could help. Quite a few grounds belonging to the clubs are the former colliery welfare ground - gifted them by the coal board when it was operating - and some of those pitches don’t have the wherewithal to cope with extreme weather.”

All these postponements and re-arrangements tend to come with a cost - both in lost revenue and stretched loyalties for the fans and the football players having to work around them.

But the cost of a postponement at a non-league club is dwarfed in comparison to cancellation of a race day- a fate Redcar racecourse suffered twice last season.

Amy Fair, general manager at Redcar, also worries about the effect that problem weather can have on the financial health of the business.

 She said: “Our difficulty isn’t whether there’s a bit of a heatwave or heavy rain, it’s when one follows after the other.

“If you have a long spell of dry weather, the course dries out and the ground becomes hard which means that if there are suddenly heavy thunderstorms, the water doesn’t drain.

“If you have really heavy rain, something like 48ml in 24 hours, the course becomes too dangerous to race on and this all has to be calculated 24 hours before the meeting is due to be held.

“Last year, that happened to us on Circus Day, and it was awful. We had gone to the expense of hiring a circus to give racegoers a real treat and then we had to ring around everyone 24 hours beforehand to tell them the meeting had been cancelled.

“You can imagine how that was: soul-destroying. People look forward to a day at the races so having it cancelled the day beforehand is upsetting for them.

“For us, it can be frightening financially because we’re a small team working hard because you’re passionate about horseracing and you still have to pay the circus, who had turned up, and you still have to pay everyone else - the doctors the nurses and the officials.”

John Maude, chairman of Corbridge Cricket Club, now officially England’s greenest club, as judged by The Cricketer magazine, says he is happy to share his experience at Corbridge and talk to anyone looking at ways to future-proof their club against extreme weather. He admits some solutions are unlikely to be cheap, but some actions will save clubs money, grants are available, and local voluntary effort can make a big difference. 

“We managed to attract funding and investment from all sorts of people after Storm Desmond left us under four feet of water.

“With that money we were able to build the pavilion on supports which elevate it above ground level, to safeguard against future flooding and do some smart things like having plug points higher up the wall. 

“We also embraced all sorts of environmentally-friendly actions - we installed solar panels, replaced gas boilers with a high-efficiency electric system, had a recycling push and created a meadow, which not only looks very pretty and increases biodiversity but also helps in terms of water absorption.

“The reality is that we are seeing the effects of climate change - we had one spell where it never rained for seven weeks which is pretty unprecedented in this part of Northumberland - but then you’ll get heavy, rainy spells.

“I suppose we’ve always had extreme weather from time to time but the difference is that those extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and that brings challenges for us all.”