Engineers worked through the weekend to replace the failed towers.
Friday’s derby between Calder United and Harrow Athletic will go ahead at Ardle Road as planned after engineers replaced the failed floodlight towers over the weekend, working in shifts from Saturday morning until late on Sunday night. The city’s safety advisory group inspected the new lights on Monday afternoon and issued a certificate shortly before five o’clock.
Two of the ground’s four corner towers failed during United’s home match against Moorside Rovers ten days ago, plunging the north-east end of the pitch into near darkness in the 63rd minute. The referee took the players off, and the match was abandoned after a forty-minute delay. An investigation found that water had got into the electrical cabinets at the base of both towers, damaging the control systems beyond repair.
A weekend against the clock
The club had originally been told that replacement parts would take at least three weeks to arrive, which would have forced the derby to be moved to another ground or postponed. Instead, United’s operations director, Fergus Lamont, tracked down a set of LED lamp arrays and control units that had been ordered for a stadium refit in another region and then held in storage after that project was delayed.
The equipment arrived on two lorries on Friday evening. A team of fourteen engineers and electricians, along with a crane crew, started work at seven the following morning. They removed the damaged lamp heads, fitted the new arrays, and rebuilt the cabinets on raised concrete plinths so that standing water could not reach them again.
“We had one go at this. If a single part was wrong, the derby wasn’t happening here,” said Lamont. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so pleased to see a light switch on as I was on Sunday night.”
Lamont said the crane had to stop twice on Saturday afternoon because of high winds, which pushed the work back by several hours. Engineers carried on under portable lights until just after eleven on Sunday, when both towers were switched on for the first time. A test on Monday measured light levels at more than 1,400 lux across the pitch, above the league’s minimum standard for televised matches.
The cost and the bigger question
The club has not confirmed the full cost of the repairs, but people familiar with the work put it at around £280,000, including the weekend overtime and the crane hire. United’s insurers are expected to cover part of that. The other two towers, which did not fail, are the same age and will be replaced in the summer at a further cost.
The incident has reopened questions about the condition of Ardle Road, which the club leases from the city. Supporters’ groups have complained for years about leaking roofs in the south stand and a lack of accessible seating. The Calder United Supporters’ Trust said the weekend work was impressive but should never have been necessary.
“The lights were twenty-five years old and everyone knew it,” said Imogen Rafferty, the trust’s secretary. “We’re glad the derby is on. But there are other parts of this ground that are living on borrowed time, and we don’t want to find out about them in the 63rd minute of a match.”
The city council, which owns the stadium, said that a condition survey commissioned earlier this year would be published before Christmas and that it would discuss a maintenance plan with the club once the findings were known.
The abandoned fixture
The league confirmed on Tuesday that the abandoned match against Moorside Rovers will be replayed in full in the new year, with a date to be fixed once both clubs’ cup commitments are known. United were leading 1–0 when the lights went out, a goal that will now be wiped from the records. Supporters who attended the original match will be admitted free of charge to the replay.
For now, attention has moved to Friday night. Around 14,500 supporters are expected at Ardle Road for a match that both clubs feared would not be played there at all. Players trained under the new lights on Tuesday evening, and goalkeeper Mark Hendry said afterwards that they were brighter than anything he had played under at the ground. “Nowhere to hide now,” he said.
