Perpignan: a new hybrid and very green “carpet” to support the ambitions of the Catalan rugby players of the USAP

Aimé Giral, the legendary temple of Catalan rugby union, has finished playing downhill matches. “There was in fact a difference of 80 cm in level between the two in-goal areas. We had to plan and compensate. Now the lawn is at the right level. And it’s a real blessing to have this new lawn to host Clermont. It was really necessary since nothing had been done for 70 years,” says François Rivière, president of the USAP, a club struggling at the start of the Top 14 championship, still looking for its first victory. after three matches and as many defeats.

For three days, the players have been increasing the number of training sequences on this new green carpet, “to get their bearings, because the dimensions of the pitch have changed”, explains Frank Azéma, the Catalan coach who, this Friday, September 27, 2024 in the morning, supervised with great concentration exercises on the sidelines, a real launching pad for building attacks. The pitch gains two meters in width, which is, on paper, a real promise of widening the game, but it has shorter in-goal areas behind the posts. Players on foot will therefore have to take these geometry parameters into account.

Thousands of kilometers of fibers anchored in the ground

“We must salute the prowess and even the performance of the teams who carried out this project in four months, a difficult deadline to meet,” underlines Louis Aliot, mayor of Perpignan, who invested nearly 3 million euros to redo the lawn. hybrid on almost 12,000 m2.

Sports turf experts used more than 600 kg of grass seed and 2,600 m3 of sand to reconstruct this rectangle with perfect planimetry. This major project was led by the Osmose design office, the same one which designed and built the famous athletics track at the Stade de France for Paris 2024. But, let Catalan supporters rest assured, the new lawn is very green, and not lilac color like the track at the Olympic Games.