What an England Rugby groundsman and a robot lawn mower have in common

25 years ago, I stood on the front row of “Fortress Twickenham”, at arm’s length from rugby legend Jonah Lomu at the 2001 London Sevens tournament. Had you told me I’d finally make it onto the pitch, I would have laughed in your face.

It turns out it’s robot lawn mowers, not rugby prowess, that eventually got me onto the hallowed turf of Allianz Stadium. I’ve now tested 25 robot mowers, which is, incidentally, 24 more than the single try I scored during my own illustrious schoolboy rugby career.

Back to 2026, and the real star of Stiga’s press day at the home of England Rugby was the new pitch. Head groundsman Jim Buttar talked us through the transformation with the glee of a man who really loves a spreadsheet, and there was plenty to sink his fork into.

The numbers are impressive. In just 12 weeks, contractors dug out 9,000 tonnes of the old pitch, going as far down as the old 1960’s drains. Over 10,000 working hours they installed a reservoir that holds 1,400 cubic metres of water, laid 26 lorry loads of new turf grown in Scotland, and buried 36 sensors under the new pitch to keep the whole thing under observation.

The result is a pitch that captures, stores and reuses its own water. Rain is drawn down into the reservoir and pumped back up when needed, so very little goes to waste. Jim’s long-term plan is to come off mains water altogether.

Jim’s team test traction and firmness against targets set specifically for rugby players, because too much or too little of either raises the risk of injury. “We treat it like an athlete,” he told us, and he really meant it. The pitch has a nutrition plan, and its stored water is oxygenated with nanobubbles to keep the soil life happy.

Stiga, the Rugby Football Union’s Official Groundskeeping Partner since October 2025, support both elite teams and grassroots rugby across the country. The brand was on hand to tell us about its involvement with rugby at all levels in England.

“Great games start with great grounds,” said James Gordon, managing director of Stiga UK. He went on to explain Stiga’s drive to support local rugby clubs across England by supplying them with robot lawn mowers. Taking some of the workload off the volunteers who keep small clubs running, it’s a smart way to help the grassroots game while showing off Stiga’s latest tech in the field. Literally.

Stiga is a proudly European manufacturer of all sorts of garden equipment, from consumer tech like powered pruners and compact mowers all the way up to professional-grade ride-on lawn mowers, and it was great to see its latest kit on the sidelines.

After a behind-the-scenes tour of Allianz Stadium, we hit the pitch. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. That’s where we met the cream of Stiga's new crop: the APX Pro, a robot mower that’s as capable as the England team itself.

Built for professional groundskeepers, the APX Pro combines robust engineering with bleeding-edge navigation technology. Its huge cutting deck and high-capacity swappable batteries make short work of up to 27,000m², or around three Allianz Stadium pitches, per mowing cycle. Guided by an AI-enhanced camera, LiDAR, RTK GPS, a gyroscope and ultrasonic obstacle detection sensors, it’s like the domestic robot mowers I’m used to testing but on a huge, impressive scale.

A little more familiar to me was the new A 50v, one of Stiga’s latest domestic robot mowers to use their new Vista Technology. It uses an AI-driven camera to navigate around the lawn and avoid common obstacles, meaning it does away with annoying antennae and fiddly boundary wires.

So, where do the best robot lawn mowers fit on a modern sports ground? For most clubs, the thing that a robot mowers offer is time back. It gets on with the job of mowing, giving volunteers more time to put up posts, paint lines, and coach the minis on a Sunday morning.

Little and often is what keeps the Allianz Stadium pitch looking and performing so well. It’s also how a robot lawn mower works: nipping out and trimming off a few millimetres of grass at a time rather than hacking through long grass once a month. No complaints, just steady performance that provides results over time.

It’s that kind of dedication that gets Stiga selected for the England rugby team. It took me 25 years and a press pass; their robots managed it on merit alone.