MetLife Stadiums new World Cup grass already getting poor reviews: Hope we find better pitches

Their grass is showing.The artificial turf field at MetLife Stadium was replaced by a natural grass playing surface in advance of this summer’s World Cup.The project — encompassing years of R and D and an early May install — was designed to take the maligned home field of the Giants and Jets and make it fit for a procession of visiting soccer superstars and eventually the World Cup final, which is set for the venue (New York New Jersey Stadium in the official parlance) on July 19.But that grass field received a string of salty reviews — yellow cards, if you will — from the first teams to play at the Meadowlands in the group stage of the World Cup.“Well, the pitch was … I don’t know if I’d even call it that,” France’s Adrien Rabiot snarked after last Tuesday’s tilt against Senegal.“It seemed more like an artificial pitch.

It was hard and rigid, but it’s like that for every team.… I hope we find better pitches in our other games.”France manager Didier Deschamps called it a “special surface,” not in a nice way.“We need to get used to this,” he said.

“There might be some cement below the grass.You have very short shards of grass here.”Part of the World Cup’s grass mandate, which affected eight stadiums across North America, is due to the different conditions optimal for soccer — the beauty in the beautiful game involves the ball rolling and skipping over the pitch in a certain way — as opposed to American football.“Because of the weather and the heat, the grass dries out quickly and the game ends up being very slow,” Brazil superstar Vinicius Junior said after his team opened its tournament with a draw against Morocco at MetLife.

“We want to move the ball from one side to the other, and this disrupts our game.”The threat of injury also looms in the background of the MetLife surface swap.The stadium’s turf has been blamed in recent years for Aaron Rodgers tearing his Achilles and Malik Nabers tearing his ACL...