Disappointment: Strath Taieri misses out on hosting final

PICTURE this.

Snowcapped hills.

Mud splattered utes. Yapping dogs. Hay bale seats. Moleskins. Swanndris. Hundreds of happy, weathered faces.

Middlemarch would have been the place to be this Saturday.

Strath Taieri qualified top in the Dunedin senior grade rugby competition and was looking forward to hosting Kaikorai in the final for what would have been the biggest day of the year in the tiny Otago hamlet.

It won’t happen now. The game will be played in Dunedin, at Logan Park No 6, where there won’t be a hay bale in sight.

Strath Taieri Rugby Club president Shane Taylor was pretty annoyed about it.

The club had not been aware, until late in the piece, the Metropolitan Council of Rugby Clubs (CRC) was planning to hold a combined finals day in Dunedin.

Once it found out, the club asked the match committee to make an exemption. That request was turned down.

‘‘There is not a lot going on here in the winter and people like getting out and coming here to watch a game of footy,’’ Taylor said.

‘‘For a finals day there would be hundreds of people here.’’

It is escape of sorts for the farming community — a chance to flee the paddocks for a few hours and socialise.

‘‘Even for myself, as president, I love coming along to catch up with the lads — just to talk about what they’ve done for the week and the boys will sit here late into the evening.’’

The rugby club was a kind of glue for the communities, he said. It helped keep everyone connected.

There was a financial element as well. Taylor estimated the club will have missed out on about $5000 in revenue from the event.

‘‘We would have put that money back into the community. We’ve got two junior teams here and we try and keep them going,’’ he said.

Match committee spokesman Blair Crawford said the CRC was sympathetic towards Strath Taieri’s position. But the decision to stage a finals day in Dunedin was made before the finalists were determined and establishing a finals festival was seen as the best way to promote grassroots rugby.

PHOTO: PETER MCINTOSH Trouble and Strath . . . Strath Taieri players (from left) Bevan Wilson, Matt Gibbs, Ezekiel Turner and Nathan Usherwood and club president Shane Taylor (centre) are angry the club will not be able to host the senior final despite finishing the roundrobin as the top qualifier.