There was an absurdity to it: a Brazilian international sitting in a suburban Newcastle sports club and drinking an orange juice. But, then again, there’s little about the experience of being a football fan in the city over the past two decades that wouldn’t count as bizarre.
Con Constantine, the Newcastle Jets’ first owner, was a businessman always looking for an angle. In 2007 he linked the club with the Adamstown Rosebuds sports club – a glorified clubhouse with a two-tap bar, a few tables and a row of about five poker machines. But Constantine had grand plans.
He had sent word to fans they should head to the club for the first away game of the season. There were maybe 20 people there. And in walked Mario Jardel, once the world’s most prolific goalscorer, with his wife and another bloke, whose job seemed to be to fetch him drinks.
Those old enough to stand on the hill at the old Breakers Stadium will remember the joys of being part of a small crowd crammed into a very small ground. There were signs of financial trouble: but perhaps they became starkest when we learned the same person had won the game day raffle every home game that season.
When Constantine took over, my teenage friends and I went to his office to ask when the new club, Newcastle United, would have merchandise for sale. “Next week,” we were told. Therein started a weekly joke with the club’s receptionist. Constantine’s mother was hand-knitting the scarves. Then they were on the boat from Cyprus. The boat never made it: the club lasted just two years before the old NSL collapsed and the A-League started.
Constantine’s reign peaked: he lifted the trophy in 2008, no thanks to Jardel who was hopelessly overweight and played a few times off the bench before heading back to Brazil. Then he had his licence nicked and handed to Nathan Tinkler, a move which surely seemed like a good idea at the time.
The Tinkler reign left a trail of unpaid debts and jilted suppliers across the Hunter, and the Newcastle Herald started to investigate his finances. The reaction was positively Trumpian: to blacklist the paper’s journalists from team events.
As Tinkler slowly went bust, he placed it into voluntary administration, which led to Football Federation Australia revoking his licence. He later insisted he had done much for the town but that people had “lined up to shit on me”.
Still he supplied us with some great moments of the bizarre. Tinkler inherited a team featuring Ljubo Milicevic, a walking talking headline, who we’d often see walking down trendy Darby Street wearing a cape. The same week Milicevic was suspended for a training ground bust up, he joined rowdy fans in the stand and even took charge of a megaphone to lead chants.
Andrew Johns, who played his entire rugby league career in Newcastle, said being a sports star in the city was like “living in a fishbowl”. Everyone has their own stories about encountering their heroes. I used to see Joel Griffiths every week at the university gym. My morning run along the beach often took me past Branko Culina, out for an early walk. My parents live a few doors down from Roy O’Donovan.
Understandably, interest in the Jets waned and crowd numbers dropped as they lost games, players and credibility. But there are few places in the world where a casual fan can sip a juice with a footballer who was once the world’s top goalscorer. And even fewer able to harness the power of a close-knit community and transform it into an atmosphere worthy of a grand final, as Newcastle’s football fans will do in Saturday night’s 2017-18 A-League decider.
