Southern Squall

A multi-million dollar football ground and pavilion that will boost Southland soccer is in part necessary because soccer can’t always be played at Invercargill’s premier stadium, a footballing city councillor suggests.

Southland Football has asked the city council for $150k toward what the Squall considers a much-needed $1.5m artificial surface planned for Turnbull Thomson Park. It’s also building a pavilion – a real home for Southland soccer – that’ll cost about $375k to build.

It’s already received $1.34m from the ILT Foundation and the ILT, and $100k from the Community Trust of Southland.

Councillors yesterday voted to include the cash in the annual plan process, but not before some worried about the council’s involvement in another big-ticket sporting development.

Some noted Hockey Southland’s tardiness paying for its new turf nearby, and that there was always a danger that the council and community funders would be left with the baby if funding dried up.

Your Squall correspondent squirmed in his seat as some in the public gallery suggested soccer should miss out because of “what happened” with hockey.

Some were also interested to learn the council might end up paying $50k more than the Community Trust, and wanted to know why the Trust hadn’t pledged more.

Cr Lindsay Thomas, a notable semi-social grade footballer, said the code needed an all-weather pitch so the season wouldn’t be disrupted by Southland’s inclement weather.

Many city pitches, including the much-heralded Sandy Point, were reduced to unplayable bogs under the twin pressures of sustained wet weather and successive football games.

Meanwhile, senior representative grade games couldn’t always be scheduled for Rugby Park because NPC and Super 14 rugby had first claim on the pitch.

Cr Thomas reminded the council that Rugby Park was originally funded and conceived as a multi-use, multi-code stadium, but that was now – “rightly” – harder to achieve.

Cr Alan Dennis is also the chairman of the ILT. He said the ILT was keen to help because football had not been funded to the same extent as other codes, and its enduring popularity meant it needed robust, top-class facilities.

Councillors were still interested to know why the Community Trust would only stump-up $100k. Cr Wayne Harpur, who is on the Trust, would not say why but said it was demonstrably important that funders and the council talked early when projects were proposed.

Cr Thomas said the pitch would also leave southern football ready to cope with the potential surge in popularity likely when the All Whites appear in the World Cup. The code didn’t want to miss the opportunities it did when NZ got to its first World Cup in 1982.

And nor do we. Plenty of codes have had plenty of money thrown at them in the past decade while southern footballers continued to play on boggy paddocks. Say what you like, the ILT and Foundation have a track record for funding winners, and we hope the council – and the annual plan submitters – will let the city help one of the most widely played codes improve its lot.

* Sound like a last-minute application for cash – after all, Southland Football announced its first grant from the ILT and ILT Foundation in April. Council works and services director Alan Bollinger told councillors the council received the application in November, but that he was only recently told about it.