THE Rodney Parade pitch is primed and ready for the first game of the season – but the £80,000 drainage improvement work is only partly done.

And work on the project, organised and paid for by Newport County AFC, won’t start again until NEXT summer.

The surface, which is used by Newport Gwent Dragons, New-port RFC and Newport County, was ripped up this summer for the first time since 1875.

The plan was to install improved drainage along with a Dragons-funded £40,000 irrigation scheme. The latter was completed but contractors ran out of time to complete the former.

The main drainage channels running the length of the pitch are in place but the sand and gravel slits that run across the pitch and tie the whole system together are only in place from the changing rooms end up to halfway. That leaves the northern end of the pitch – traditionally the most troublesome end – still at risk of flooding. The project will be completed next summer but ahead of the Exiles’ Football League return against Accrington Stanley on Saturday, head of operations Mark Jones has urged against expecting miracles.

He said: “The whole job wasn’t finished and we know that at some stage we will have problems – that is inevitable with three teams playing on the pitch.

“People see the pitch at this time of year and think it looks fantastic and that it will last but experience tells you that it is not going to be the case.

“It played okay in County’s game against Aston Villa at the weekend, although in an ideal world I’d have liked another month to get things ready!

“It is always going to be a tight schedule when you rip up a whole field and start again and it was something that we knew had to be done because it was so undulated.

“With 60-odd games we’ll be up against it again. People call me pessimistic but I think that I am a realist.

“And we are in the lap of the gods when it comes to the weather, and what tends to happen when there’s a game at Rodney Parade, whether rugby or football, is that those upstairs tend to douse us a little bit.”

Newport County chief executive Dave Boddy confirmed that the new system, which takes water towards a pit in the north west corner of the ground to be pumped away, is incomplete and that work would take place next year.

“It’s not half done, the drainage is there in its entirety with sand slits in lengthways, but the contractors only managed to put the gravel slits widthwise up to halfway,” he said.

“The ground up towards the North Terrace kept disintegrating and was not capable of taking the gravel slits so they will come back next summer to finish the job.”