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It is often regarded as the cradle of football in Australia. The oldest clubs in Australia reside there, and some of them have histories longer than the biggest European clubs.
It is of course, Newcastle, that wonderful city 160 kilometres north of Sydney, a university town, gateway to the wineries of the Hunter Valley, with beautiful beaches just a stone’s throw from the city centre.
And yes, I’m biased. I spent five fantastic years in Newcastle and have friends there to this day.
The Australian national team first played in Newcastle in 1923 against New Zealand. That was the same year the FA Cup final went to a brand-new stadium in London called Wembley. Sydney was still geographically divided by its harbour, with no bridge to link the north and south. Airships were regarded as the future of long distance travel. And the oldest football clubs in the coal-mining town were already approaching their middle age.
Fast forward 92 years and Newcastle has hosted its biggest Socceroos international ever, as the national team scored a 2-0 semi-final win over United Arab Emirates to advance to the Asian Cup final. However, the seeds for the Socceroos’ modern connection with Newcastle were sown in the mid 1980s in unique circumstances.
Newcastle were the first truly regional representatives in any national club competition, when Newcastle KB United were admitted to the National Soccer League in 1978. An instant success with the fans, Newcastle attracted crowds of 15,000 to their home games at the grandly named International Sports Centre (now Hunter Stadium).
In 1979, ‘KB’, as the club were affectionately known, drew a crowd of 18,367 for a match against Sydney Olympic. It was a record crowd for the fledgling national league, and it stood for almost 20 years, until Northern Spirit’s first game in the NSL in 1998, ironically also against Sydney Olympic, broke it.
Those early stars for Newcastle became local legends; names like Ken Boden, Col Curran, Roy Drinkwater, Phil Dando and David Jones are still known by the football community in the city to this day, and some of them are still putting back into the local football scene.
Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of national club football in the Hunter is instability, and that certainly started with KB. In 1983, the club could have won the NSL championship on a dramatic final day when four teams were in contention for the title (which was decided as a ‘first past the post’ winner with no finals). They were pipped by the Frank Arok-coached St George.
By 1984, Newcastle KB United had folded, taken over by local powerhouse Adamstown Rosebuds. The new NSL entity was called Newcastle Rosebud United, coached by the hard-as-nails Willie Gallagher. Incredibly, the cobbled-together side won the National League Cup that year, beating Melbourne Croatia 1-0 in a midweek final in Melbourne.
By then the NSL had become a bloated 24-team competition played in two conferences. By 1986, the governing body of football had decided to reduce the NSL back to a 14 team, one conference league, which meant 10 teams had to go. Despite having a stellar season, Newcastle Rosebud United faced St George in the final round of the regular season. A win would have seen Rosebuds qualify for the semi-finals. Yet under the convoluted assessment system, a loss would see them lose their NSL place. Once again, it was a team coached by Frank Arok that denied the Novocastrians, a heart-breaking 2-1 loss at Adamstown Oval sending Newcastle back to state league football.
Adamstown Rosebud pulled out of funding the team and concentrated on their Northern NSW sides. The club competed as Newcastle Soccer Club for a season in the NSW State League. Meanwhile, Willie Gallagher had taken charge of Austral United, a team in the Northern NSW league who were challenging the established local powerhouses of Adamstown, Belmont-Swansea and West Wallsend. Austral played at Austral Park in Birmingham Gardens in the western part of town. In 1987, Austral and Adamstown met in a memorable Northern NSW grand final at Speers Point, Lake Macquarie. Adamstown had won the minor premiership in a canter but after leading 2-0 at half time, they were overrun 3-2 in the grand final, when another local legend Wayne Bailey scored the winner in the last five minutes.
That grand final win was enough to see Austral assume the mantle as Newcastle’s representatives in the NSW State League (what we would now call NPL 1). The club was re-branded Newcastle Austral and in their first state league season, both first grade and Under 20s teams finished in the top four.
But the club’s biggest game of the year wasn’t in the state league. Frank Arok felt the weight of responsibility towards Newcastle – after all, his club side had twice denied the locals in the preceding five years. And so the Socceroos played their first game in the Steel City in many years – an exhibition game against Newcastle Austral only a week before the local side were due to play in the State League semi-finals.
This was a Socceroos team fresh off a famous 4-1 win over World Champions Argentina in the Gold Cup a month previously, and 10,000 people crammed Austral Park to see the locals go down fighting 2-0 to the national team. The Newcastle Austral team that August night in 1988 contained David Jones, a stalwart from the KB United days, as well as grand final hero Wayne Bailey. Also invited back to play in the exhibition were former Newcastle players Darren Stewart, Clint Gosling and Peter Tredinnick, who played alongside his brother Howard.
Later in the year, the Socceroos returned again to play the second leg of a home-and-away tie against Fiji. Amazingly, Arok’s Roos were beaten 1-0 in Suva, and so the return leg at Speers Point became a must-win game. Australia triumphed 5-1 in a game remembered more for an all-in brawl sparked by Fijian frustrations in which Socceroos skipper Charlie Yankos suffered a broken nose which Arok wryly observed would need to be reset with a splint.
In 1989, the Socceroos returned twice. Another game against Newcastle Austral, this time at the beginning of the season, resulted in another 2-0 win for the national team, which was sprinkled with Young Socceroos in preparation for the 1989 World Youth Cup.
1989 was a huge milestone for the other Newcastle club in this intertwined story. Adamstown Rosebuds were celebrating their club centenary, and negotiated with the Socceroos for a historic match at Adamstown Oval late in the season. Mindful once more of his role in the ups and downs of the club’s fortunes, Arok brought the Socceroos to town for the fourth time in 12 months. Adamstown scored a memorable 2-1 win over the national team to mark their hundredth birthday.
There were international games in 1992 and 1995, but the Asian Cup semi-final marks the first time in almost two decades that the Socceroos have played in Newcastle. Strange to think that in the late ’80s, they played in the famous football nursery as often as they did in Sydney.
All because a famous former Socceroos coach felt he owed the old town a few favours.
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