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It’s the five-hour round trip from the middle of Dragons heartland that Mark Frendo is struggling to get his head around to watch his beloved Red V.
Having bristled at St George Illawarra’s sticky financial bind, which has forced them to resort to a sparse home game schedule at Wollongong for 2014, Mr Frendo then contemplated what it would mean to watch the Dragons next season.
So the Mercury worked it out for him, using the Dragons’ newly minted ‘‘home’’ games against the Bulldogs and Tigers/Eels at ANZ Stadium, in the heart of Sydney’s west, as a guide.
And we found, using Saturday’s train timetable for example, Mr Frendo and his family would spend more than five hours on exhausting train trips for a return journey to catch a 7.30pm kick-off. They couldn’t expect to be home until well after midnight.
If the games were still in Wollongong, Mr Frendo would need just 23 minutes to commute between Albion Park Rail, his closest station, and the city’s main train hub.
‘‘To me there’s two pillars of the joint venture: [one is] they keep the jumper, name and logo,’’ said the Haywards Bay-based Mr Frendo, a Dragons member for 14 years who has only missed four games in Wollongong during that time.
‘‘The other pillar should be Wollongong gets 50per cent of the games. I call them non-negotiables.
‘‘I like to go whether it’s raining, Monday night or Saturday night, or they lose 10 in a row...that’s my thing.
‘‘It’s the casual bloke who says, ‘I might become a member this year’ who finds out they’re taking games away [from Wollongong] who really suffers.’’
The two games at ANZ Stadium can essentially account for Wollongong’s scrapped fixtures, which now stand at four after the Dragons announced a seismic shift to their home game allocation for the next four years.
The Dragons are exploring public transport options for ticketed members to the Sydney games, but it’s unlikely to appease Illawarra fans feeling left out in the cold.