AFL legend Adam Goodes and NRL star Beau Ryan are on Albion Park City FC’s radar for the ‘Football For Fires’ fundraiser.
The club has already locked in several former players, with Sydney FC boss Steve Corica and Ljubo Milicevic joining Luke Wilkshire, David Carney, Scott Chipperfield, Brett Emerton and Patrick Zwaanswijk in coming out of retirement for the game.
SBS journalist and Albion Park local Adrian Arciuli was one of the club’s foundation members and says has been searching “far and wide” for former players to get involved to help raise funds for the bushfire appeal.
“We’re going to reach out to Adam Goodes and I know one of the guys is best mates with Beau Ryan, who’s an Albion Park boy,” he said.
“Hopefully we get eight-to-ten former players to come on board and have ten of our guys suit up and mix and match, so it’ll be quite good,” he said.
“What the whole idea was for the fundraisers is we have a few major sponsors and for every goal 200 dollars gets donated from the DRB group and we’re trying to get another business to give 100 dollars per save.
The organised fundraiser will feature an ‘All-star eleven’ featuring several former Socceroos up against NPL NSW giants Wollongong Wolves at Ian McLennan park in Illawara, raising money for the bushfire appeal.
“I reached out to Luke [Wilkshire] and said ‘The Wolves start their pre-season the week after so I thought why don’t we do something the week before?’,” Mr Arciuli said.
“It’s just a good chance to give back and raise some much-needed funds for the victims. Obviously, the south coast region has been really impacted and one of the players for the Wolves Chris Price, I think, his parents place burned down, so there’s so many sad stories here and we just wanted to do something to help out.”
The match is scheduled for Saturday 18 January and will also be live streamed on social media, with a link being set up in conjunction with the Salvation Army for people to donate.
