Are the covers not in use ?
Under the old club I remember helping to clear snow off the pitch which was piled up on top of the covers. It wasn't an easy job and required a lot of manpower and a sense of humour helped.
In the notorious "dead" area in front of the stand there was a big sigh when the covers were taken off and we saw lumps of ice all across that side of the pitch.
So the next job was trying to dig pieces out of it without doing too much damage to the grass. The groundskeeper, as you can imagine, was not a happy bunny to say the least and kept running to different "diggers" to tell them that they were wrong and to stop while he explained how they should be doing it.
I found a large piece of ice as big as a (small) football which would not play nicely. I had an idea... and don't try this at home children... I filled the kettle and boiled the water and whilst the groundskeeper was looking the other way... I poured it onto the big ice lump...
Unfortunately I'd been spotted and the poor bloke came charging over and yelling at me for "killing" his grass.
For some reason he had a complete meltdown (pardon the pun). When he stopped for breath I confronted him and asked him if he'd rather have a small patch of dead grass and explain to the management why we couldn't play..or we could just play the ******* match.
I won the argument and, somehow, we were able to play that day. Ah, them were't days.
A rather long winded way of illustrating that even if we had covers, it wouldn't necessarily stop ice forming in front of the stand.
Anyone seen the kettle...