WAYNE Rooney, David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and co will play out England's footballing dreams at this summer's World Cup on grass lovingly prepared using equipment from Suffolk.

WAYNE Rooney, David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and co will play out England's footballing dreams at this summer's World Cup on grass lovingly prepared using equipment from Suffolk.

Ransomes Jacobsen, the Ipswich-based turf care equipment manufacturer, will be supplying the mowers which will be used to prepare many of the grounds for the show-piece games.

Among them are the stadia in Nuremberg and Cologne where England will play Trinidad & Tobago and Sweden respectively during the initial group stage of the tournament.

The global spectacle is set to feature 32 teams playing a total of 64 matches before the winners emerge in the final at the spectacular Olympiastadion in Berlin on July 9.

All pitches are being newly-laid for the competition, using 240,000 square metres of new turf which is currently being grown in the Netherlands and Germany.

Many of these will be prepared using Ransomes Jacobsen equipment such as the Ransomes Mastiff, a walk-behind mower with a 91cm cutting width.

Many of the UK's leading football clubs use the machine as their preferred mower, and the new Wembley stadium has recently taken delivery of two.

Alfons Gottemeyer, of The Turf Care Co GmbH, which distributes the equipment in Germany, said: “As a nation, we are very proud to be hosting the World Cup, but as a company we are delighted that many of the stadiums will be using Ransomes Jacobsen equipment supplied by us.

“We have recently supplied Ransomes Mastiffs to the stadia in Cologne and Dortmund, especially for World Cup matches. Many others already use our equipment.”

The equipment is also being used at Volkspark Stadion, Hamburg; Niedersachsenstadion, Hannover; Westfalenstadion, Dortmund; Olympiastadion, Berlin; Arena auf Schalke, Gelsenkirchen; Frankenstadion, Nuremberg and World Cup stadium, Cologne.