THIS newspaper has taken note of the suggestion by Mr Cedric Blair, managing director of Jamaica’s premier league football title sponsors Red Stripe, regarding the vexed issue of playing surfaces.

Mr Blair believes organisers of the premier league should consider using fewer venues in order to ensure games are played on reasonably good surfaces.

As the situation now stands, teams in the 12-club premier league are inclined to play their home games at base or close to base in order to get as much support as possible and to maximise gate receipts.

The trouble is, several of those fields are well below the standard that is essential for good football.

Mindful of the need for a consistently higher quality of football if there is to be value for sponsorship money, Mr Blair says there should be “fewer fields, but of better quality… maybe six to eight venues”.

His point is well made. Without a reasonably good playing surface on which the ball will roll evenly and predictably there won’t be good football.

And while much is being made of the situation at the premier league level, it is far worse in schools’ football, which is the nursery. Indeed, we contend that some fields now being used for the Lime-sponsored schoolboy football competition pose a real and present danger to limb, if not to life.

Obviously then, regardless of whether Mr Blair’s suggestion is taken on board in the premier league, this long-standing problem of playing surfaces must be addressed in a comprehensive way at all levels.

It’s well-established that a major hindrance to the improvement of fields is the absence of cheap and easy access to water. Without water, maintenance of a football field in dry periods becomes well nigh impossible. And commercial water is simply too expensive for that purpose.

Readers will recall that it was the opening up of a well at the National Stadium just over a decade ago that finally allowed that playing surface to be brought to international standard.

At a lower level, the reopening of a long-dormant well by the Digicel Foundation at St Elizabeth Technical High School in Santa Cruz has made it much easier for that school to maintain a field of comparatively good standard.

However, the opening up of wells is an expensive proposition and, in many areas of mountainous Jamaica, next to impossible. In any case, the digging of wells is environmentally touchy.

So what’s to be done? It seems to us the time has come for all stakeholders to knock heads with soil and other scientific experts to find ways of maintaining fields at minimum acceptable standards with as little water as possible. Rainwater storage would be a big help. And perhaps there is drought-resistant grass that could assist field maintenance? Could thought be given to artificial surfaces?

It would be interesting to know how other countries in our region and elsewhere are dealing with the problem. Let’s all knock heads.