By Agron Latifi
Illawarra Mercury
27/11/2004
Re-development works scheduled for the Dragons' Kogarah based home means the club will play its first four home games of season 2005 in Wollongong.
The Dragons' first WIN Stadium stoush will be against Melbourne in round two.
They will also play the Eagles (round 5), Broncos (round 6), Rabbitohs (round 9), Warriors (round 13), Wests Tigers (round 16) and Roosters (round 21) in Wollongong.
The joint venture club won't head to Oki Jubilee Stadium until round 10 when they battle the Panthers. The venue will also host games against the Cowboys (round 14), Sharks (round 20), Eels (round 24) and Knights (round 26).
St.George Illawarra chief executive Peter Doust said the club wanted to allow building works at Oki to be completed.
"What we tried to do was similar to what we did when we put the northern grandstand (WIN) in. We played a lot of our home games away
from WIN so we could enable the development work to be finalised," Doust said.
"It is not the best way we'd like to do it. We'd like to have almost one game a month in each of the two communities because that's the strength of our two-market strategy.
"That's the way we'd like to do it but we can't be too disappointed by the fact that we've received $8 million from the Federal Government to help us continue the improvement process with Oki, so we've just got to work around that."
Installing lights, extra seating and new turnstiles are among the refurbishments planned for Oki in the coming months.
But it is the installation of lights which will affect where the joint venture club's home games are played from 2006 and beyond.
All Dragons night games, including free-to-air Friday night fixtures were always played at WIN. That won't be the case anymore.
"We could have come up with a draw that gave us one at WIN and one at Oki, and finish with WIN," Doust said.
"The only problem was that round 26 is the weekend of the Tooheys League grand finals, which is a big weekend of events in rugby league in Wollongong and we don't want necessarily to disrupt that. That's why we got Oki at the end, otherwise it would have gone the other way."
Copyright © 2004 Illawarra Mercury
