On Friday, I watched the space shuttle Endeavour launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

On a moonlit night, I was on a deck of a ship sailing from Fort Lauderdale to nowhere in particular, smoothly moving across the water at barely walking pace.

Meanwhile, the red-hot dot of the shuttle's rocket flame thrust the spacecraft through the air at 2000 miles per hour.



It was the beginning of a somewhat surreal weekend spent aboard the Celebrity Solstice, a super-new mega-luxury cruise liner about to enter a life on the ocean waves.

It's a ship heavier than 22,700 male African elephants and is longer than the Eiffel Tower is high. Some cabins are far larger than my apartment. One of the ship's 10 or so bars features a high-tech beverage dispenser that squirts top of the range wine into your glass as if it were soda.

This sort of stuff is probably to be expected on a cruise ship but what most definitely wasn't was the presence of a golf course on the ship's top deck. A golf course (OK, I exaggerate slightly, this was a putting green) laid with real, soft, lush, grass.

A half-acre of it.

On a ship.

On the sea.

For those of you wondering why you're reading about an indulgent luxury weekend trip on a sports website (and aren't impressed by the golf link, boom-tish) here's the bridge. Growing grass on a ship on a salty sea is a challenge.

Enter (former) Lancashire County Cricket Club groundsman Peter Marron, who quit working at Manchester's rainy Old Trafford to tend to seaborne turf.

"I really did think it was a wind-up," said Marron when he first received the offer to move from Manchester to Florida.

"It's the kind of thing that (cricketer) Freddie Flintoff would do."

"Even when I got to the airport I thought maybe I'm going to be presented with a model ship and some turf. It's really been a dream job. I'm led to believe it's raining in Manchester – I'm heartbroken," he told the BBC.

"I was intrigued to see the lawn because it is something unique and it just goes to show what incredible things can be done these days," Marron added.

Which got me thinking. If real turf can be laid out on a ship for a putting green, the English Premier League's desire to have their so- called "39th Game" hosted at various stadiums around the world could be easier than they think.

Why bother hosting football matches in Sydney, Shanghai, or even Florida, when you could have a floating pitch that hauls itself around the world, stopping off in picturesque harbours, Harlem Globetrotter style?

Except, to cap off the weekend of absurdity, it seems this has already been considered and the people considering it are the very same people who built the Solstice, with its grass putting course.

If they can send a rocket into space, a football game at sea is not so far-fetched.


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