A forced relocation has been doing football club ONR from Roden for more than two years. While the municipality of Noordenveld is investigating another possibility than the offending ‘Option New Roden’, the G-football ONR Foundation mainly fears for its survival. About one thing, players and guidance at least agree: moving to the neighboring village would be the end of G-football.
Every Thursday evening two G-teams from ONR train on Hullenweg. “For fifteen years now, of which in the last ten years under the umbrella of its own foundation,” says chairman Janetta Roede. The players are members of ONR, but are facilitated by the foundation. They have their own artificial grass field with a lease contract up to and including 2033 at the municipality of Noordenveld.
That contract also lasts when ONR has to move. “But if we only have an artificial grass field here, without the changing rooms and canteen of ONR, then that is nothing,” says Roede. “It is important for us to get clarity from the municipality of Noordenveld as quickly as possible.”
It must be noted that VV ONR is currently not in conversation with the municipality of Noordenveld. The municipality, which wants to build a new residential area on and around the site where ONR is now playing, has therefore searched for other locations for the club. Going together in the field of football club Nieuw-Roden would ‘fit’, research showed. But Onr does not want. “We are Oranje Nassau Roden, not Oranje Nassau Nieuw-Roden,” a board member said before RTV Drenthe.
Reason for the municipal council of Noordenveld to urge alex Wekema (GroenLinks/PvdA) to look for a different location. “We expect to hear from that before the summer,” he says.
Wekema finds it annoying that onrr – unlike VV Nieuw -Roden – is no longer in conversation with the municipality. “My call is: come to the table, think and talk. We need each other.”
Beautiful and nice, but ONR says it will only come to the table if the ‘New Roden’ option goes off the table. That feeling lives even stronger at the G-football foundation. “If we go to New Roden, I will stop,” says player Robin Crapanzano, for example. Player Anisha Slump also stops then. “I think almost everyone stops,” she says.
The question now is whether the municipality of Noordenveld can still conjure up a rabbit from the top hat. Because the G-football players of ONR would like to go ‘back, behind or sideways’. “But not the village,” emphasizes chairman Roede.
“If you start from place where all your history is, then it hurts,” says Alderman Wekema. “But the reality is that we have a home problem, especially in Roden. In the end I think ONR can also make new history in a different place.”