Newmarket Park gloom

Press, 21 August 1979, Page 32

Newmarket Park gloom

PA Auckland Soccer administrators believe that the cost of restoring their headquarters ground at Newmarket Park, Auckland, could reach $500,000. They also believe it will be three years before the ground can be made fit again for top-class matches. The conclusions from an engineering report will cause an appeal to F.1.F.A., the world football body, which has a disaster fund to help soccer associations in trouble. The Auckland association chairman, Mr Charlie Dempsey, will break into his world tour schedule with the New Zealand national team in October to broach the subject with F.I.F.A. officials in Europe. He has also written to the

Newmarket Borough Coum seeking its attitude to tl future of the park. “The answer could tell u whether we look for a new permanent headquarters, or a temporary one,” Mr Dempsey said yesterday. Big cracks and movement to the terraces at Newmarket Park have added to soccer despondency after a slip early in July which carried away a strip of the touchline and one-third of the eastern stand. The ground has been closed ever since. Floodlight towers and the remainder of the stand on the Bassett Road side have been dismantled, and a large drainage ditch dug through the centre of the ground in an effort to take water away from the stream running through the gully.