Rangers will be happy to hear that their Scottish Premiership opponents Kilmarnock have finally decided to abandon their plastic pitch.
According to BBC Sport, Kilmarnock hopes to resume playing on grass at Rugby Park for the 2025–2026 season since a new training complex is being built.
Majority shareholder Billy Bowie is still awaiting planning permission to be granted for the ambitious project, which will see two new pitches and a 250-person stand built in Ayrshire.
With the new location set to house the Kilmarnock youth team and the club’s Women’s team, the plastic pitch at Rugby Park will be lifted and laid at the new training complex.
Kilmarnock will then go back to a grass pitch and the news will be welcomed by Rangers and the club’s fans, with several managers of the Ibrox club outspoken about the surfaces.
Kilmarnock will discard its synthetic pitch.
In 2019, Steven Gerrard, the former manager of Rangers, declared the surfaces “dangerous” and demanded that they be removed from the Scottish Premier League.
This came about in 2018 following a confrontation with Kilmarnock manager Steve Clarke over the Rugby Park field after Jamie Murphy suffered a catastrophic injury.
The Scotland international saw his initially promising Rangers career decimated by an injury on Kilmarnock’s surface in 2018 with Gerrard claiming they have “elite football should’ve have plastic pitches”.
Michael Beale was also outspoken about the Kilmarnock pitch after a 3-2 victory in January claiming the surface guaranteed the game wouldn’t be a “beauty contest”.
Kilmarnock aren’t the only ones with a plastic surface of course, with Livingston also using a synthetic pitch with Rangers visiting the club over the weekend.
Rangers manager Philippe Clement was also outspoken about the surface and echoed the claims from Steven Gerrard that the game is better off without them.
The Rangers manager claims “there’s a reason” the top leagues in European football don’t use the surfaces and after the game branded the pitches “tricky”.
“For the quality of football, for the quality of spectators to watch good football games, it needs to be on grass pitches,” said Clement.
Kilmarnock first installed their plastic pitch at Rugby Park in summer of 2014 and most recently had a new pitch installed in the summer of 2019.
