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Waz - 5 May 2020 1:34 PM

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evolution - 5 May 2020 12:21 PM

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rooboy91 - 5 May 2020 11:59 AM

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evolution - 4 May 2020 4:14 PM

McDonald Jones Stadium is great when a good crowd is in (still needs the ends seated though), but for the Jets on a stinking hot Sunday arvo against Wellington it's vastly oversized.

The W-League and Youth team have made No.2 Sportsground home in the last few years and with some work this could make a good home for the Mens team. It's council owned but the local Rugby scene has contributed some funds to renovate it previously and hence think they own it - but Rugby will be dead soon so don't think this is much of an issue. 

It's much closer to the CBD of Newcastle (some would argue it is in the CBD), close to transport and walking distance to the Honeysuckle area for pre/post match activities (not forgetting King St Maccas, KFC and Dan Murphy's of course). Capacity 12,000ish would be ideal.

Set up for a W-League game:



Parking situation would need to be improved, but Moore Park is no different there (older pic).



It's recently had some more seating added on the grandstand side but I'd like to see it done up to be something like Hindmarsh or Toyota Field in San Antonio (all the way around though, 3 sided stadiums are shite).



Of course I'm completely aware this is pie-in-the-sky dreamland stuff.

Does the old stadium that the Breakers used still exist?

Yes, now primarly a greyhound track but one of the local clubs Wallsend FC (one below NPL) uses it as a home ground as well.

Basically no public transport or parking and the location is not ideal (near Shortland Wetlands so mozzie central in Summer) to be a serious contender for a future A-League venue. However I did find an article from 2016 when the Jets were looking at it as a home base/training ground (with some pics from the NSL and Super League days).

Bit of info on the stadium here 

A little ironic that a perfectly good rectangular stadium
was converted from rectangular into a greyhound stadium. 

Imagine if Frank hadn’t of been stubborn - that could have been an 11,000 rectangular stadium now. 

"On the western edge of Newcastle, rising out of the swamp, there's a field of broken dreams. At least that's the way Con Mitsios sees it.

After decades of back-breaking manual labour his pride and joy - Breakers Stadium - went to the dogs. Literally. What was once a showpiece for football in the Hunter has become a greyhound track.

It's been that way since 2005 - five years after Newcastle Breakers collapsed under the weight of their debts. History tells us Con Constantine took possession of the license but not the stadium - choosing instead to move the team back to what's now known as Hunter Stadium, and calling his new team the Jets.

For Mitsios, that was the beginning of the end. One of the founders of the Newcastle Australs club which bought the site next to a scrap metal yard in 1965 and turned it into one of the better venues in the old NSL, he could scarcely believe it when he heard it was ultimately sold for a knockdown price of $1million. ''Such a waste,'' he laments.

Volunteer labour (''we were there for breakfast, and we were still there for dinner'') created something out of nothing at Birmingham Gardens. It's a story replicated throughout football's post-war boom. Ethnic communities - in this case a coalition of migrants from the Greta camp near Maitland - brought together by their common love of football, and their willingness to put their time, and money, into creating bricks and mortar for the game.

But for Mitsios and those who formed the club called Australs which ultimately became the Breakers, all that heart and soul eventually counted for nothing. When the club began to struggle, Mitsios asked Northern NSW Football to purchase the site and keep it in the 'family'. Nobody wanted to listen. "