This Leicester Life: “Fans weren’t allowed in the stands

DB: What was your experience of the Premier League title-winning season? When did you start to think it was a possibility that we were going to win it?

ZM: Very, very late on. Probably during the Chelsea-Tottenham game! As the season was going on, people were throwing the question about and it was more fans of other teams because none of my friends were Leicester fans. It never entered my head though. We weren’t going to win the Premier League.

My dad was the same. We both thought no way, this isn’t going to happen. Things go wrong and people slip up right at the last second.

I still can’t describe the feeling now. But after every game, I’d be in the car with my dad and my brother and we’d do a debrief on the way home and I’ve never felt anything like it – the positivity around the whole club. For me it’s always about seeing my dad’s face and my brother’s face when we’re at games where we’ve won. It’s an unbeatable feeling.

DB: Fast forward a few years and you get a job working on the grounds staff at Leicester – how did that come about?

ZM: So this was April 2020. I’d applied to go to Derby University to do football journalism but I wasn’t really sure if it was the right time as everything was a bit up in the air with the pandemic. I saw an advert for a ground staff apprentice at Leicester. I didn’t think there was a chance I’d get the job but I thought I’d apply and see what happened.

That was to work at Seagrave, and I did an interview over Zoom but I didn’t get it. I was probably a bit disappointed because I thought I’d done well, and then a few weeks later I got a call saying the grounds team at the stadium would like to interview me for a role at the stadium rather than Seagrave.

So I went into the King Power and did the interview there, then later I got a call saying that I’d got the job. I’d only really told my dad and my stepmum that I’d applied. None of the rest of my family knew, and suddenly I was starting in three weeks.

DB: Do you remember day one?

ZM: I do. This was the craziest day for me. I went in to the KP and I met all the staff and had a tour of all the facilities, which I’d never done before as a fan. I’d only ever been there on a match day before. Then I remember going home with this massive box full of training gear and thinking it felt really strange to be given that straight out of the club shop.

DB: What did the job involve?

ZM: Working at the stadium is obviously very different to the training ground because you’re constantly in the routine of having matches regularly. So day to day, it’d be working Monday to Friday, then every match day and normally the day after a match too.

It was extremely full-on which is what I always try to get across to people who ask about it. It’s not just a job. You really have to dedicate your life to it. You have to be fully invested because essentially you’re spending your whole life at the King Power, which isn’t going to be for everyone.

Day to day you go in, brush the pitch, during the winter we had the lights on so you would manoeuvre them or take them fully off. We would normally do at least one cut every day. As it led up to match days, on a Thursday and Friday, you might do a full double cut of the pitch which takes a good few hours. When I was in the job I started speaking to grounds staff at different stadiums and that really showed me how high the standards were that the staff at Leicester set themselves

On a match day, let’s say if we had a 12.30 kickoff we could be in the stadium for half 4 or 5 o’clock and you’d have an 11-hour day. Again, dedicating your life to it, not just turning up an hour before the match. We would do a double cut, three of us would cut it twice and we’d go lengthways and widthways to get that pattern for the telly. Then we would do a double mark afterwards. We marked all the lines on a match day rather than the day before which I think always looked great.

We’d get some time to chill as the players come out to start warming up, then we’d be out there divoting which fans would see on a match day, obviously out at halftime and then straight after we’d cut again or divot, depending on what happened during the game.

DB: But presumably you started when there were no fans in the stadium?

ZM: Yeah, and this is a big thing for me now when I look back because I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was. Fans weren’t allowed in the stands but I was on the pitch. Now it’s the main reason I’m extremely glad that I did it.

I started in August 2020 and fans only came back for the final game at the end of that season. The stadium was dead silent and you could hear everything the players were saying. The ground staff actually had to be ballboys because they restricted how many people were allowed into the stadiums and I never thought I would ever do that.

Everything felt a little bit more relaxed because there were no fans. When they were warming up, Kasper would always speak to us. Half the time he was probably having about a moan about something but there was that bit of interaction. The coaches and staff would always say hi, which was nice.

Everyone used to laugh at me because not everyone that works there is a Leicester fan but for me, being seriously obsessed with Leicester, I would be constantly starstruck. The fact that I would be stood next to Jamie Vardy as I’m divoting the pitch or whatever.

Then at the end of that season, it was the FA Cup final. Before the game, Brendan Rodgers brought all the grounds staff together to say thank you for everything we’d done to get to that point. I think he did it with every department. That was one of the biggest highlights for me while I was working there, getting a personal thank you from the manager.

I had respect for Brendan in the sense you could tell he was a genuinely nice guy and I only ever heard good things about how he interacted with the staff. Obviously, the fan in me overrode that eventually so I ended up with the same opinion of him as many did by the end of last season!

DB: What eventually made you decide to move on?

ZM: I did one full season so we just had that one game with the fans in and then straight after that they were doing a full-on renovation of the pitch at the stadium so I had a bit of time off, then I was working at Belvoir Drive for a few weeks.

Having that time off and then being on the training ground, which is a completely different experience, made me step back and re-evaluate things slightly. Maybe I was a bit too young to be spending my whole life doing something you really have to dedicate yourself to. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do but I thought if I stepped away, there was always the option to go back.

So I made the decision in August 2021 to hand my notice in. I knew especially not going to away games during the pandemic that I wanted to get straight back into it and didn’t want work to impact that. Not everyone might agree with that decision but going to away games is such a massive thing for me that I wasn’t sure if I was dedicated enough to give that up.

DB: This is also because you wanted to pursue a career in sports journalism?

ZM: That has always been my plan. That is always what I wanted to do. I still had my offer from Derby but I wanted to go further afield so I went to Liverpool, which is a really good uni for journalism. I handed my notice in at Leicester in August and by September I was on the course and living in Liverpool.

I absolutely love it. No regrets whatsoever. It’s such an interesting subject and sometimes I feel like I’m living the dream. I get to go and watch football and somehow get to call it work and put it towards my degree at the same time.

I do a lot of work with Southport and I really enjoy going down there. They’ve got a really good fan base and it’s always a good atmosphere. I also go to Liverpool Women and Everton Women, especially if Leicester are playing up there.

DB: So that means you’ve missed quite a few games this season, I take it?

ZM: Erm, no. People always assume I can’t make every game because I’m living up in Liverpool but I’ve always said my priority is that I go away with Leicester every other weekend or midweek or whenever it is. I try not to put myself in situations where that would be impacted.

For my degree I’ll go to local midweek games and if Leicester are playing on a Friday or Monday night then I might be able to go to a game over the weekend. But I’ve only missed two games this season because I was away in January and I did not enjoy missing those.

DB: Have you got a dream job in mind?

ZM: In November, I went to spend a week with Owynn and the team at Radio Leicester. They were some of the best few days of my life and I felt like the luckiest person ever. That was the first place I’ve been to where I could see myself in terms of a dream job. Presenting the shows would be great. Obviously Owynn does a lot of commentary and I said to him when I was there that I couldn’t see myself doing commentary on Leicester because I get way too into it. I don’t know how he holds it back.

But then it might be that I’ve already done someone else’s dream job, working in the sports turf industry. The world of grounds staff is still very male-dominated. When I started, they told me I was the only female ever to work in that kind of role in a Premier League stadium.

Lots of people now ask me how I got into it, and I’ve even got a few friends that do it now as their job because they saw me doing it first. I would just say that it’s one of the best environments I’ve ever worked in and would say to anyone, if you want a career change, definitely give it a try. If you love football, it’s such a great industry.