Tradition counting for less and less in provincial rugby
There was a time when rugby was the main attraction. You’d turn up to Rugby Park, if you were lucky Bill Read would have let a curtain raiser be played on the No 1 field, before Taranaki fronted.
It was always on a Saturday afternoon, except when it was Anzac Day or a touring team was in town, and if you were lucky you’d get something to eat from the wooden hut halfway down the hill.
Simpler times, when any down time was taken up by reading the well prepared programme that was full of information about players, clubs, statistics and even the odd opinion piece penned by someone not brave enough to put their real name to it.
Fast forward to 2016 and the ‘‘match day experience’’ has changed dramatically.
Now, when you arrive at Yarrow Stadium, you have to go through the first wave of security guards who relish their part-time work. The car pass you’ve had to go down on your knees for is inspected, not just through the window but outside it because apparently some cheeky sod has photocopied some to sell on the car pass black market.
Once the officious senior citizen has satisfied herself that the said pass is not counterfeit you are waved through to the next guard who removes the barriers tough enough to stop a team bus getting through.
From that point you go about parking before you go through the bag checking, just in case you’ve been sneaky enough to try and take a small bottle of beer into the ground that would prevent the licence holders from charging you the price of half a dozen for the pleasure of one crisply cold can.
The next fun part of the ‘‘match day experience’’ is trying to find a souvenir programme from the Spotswood clubrooms entrance.
There was none but a quick raid of the Radio Sport booth proves successful.
It’s hard to express how you feel when you realise things you once really looked forward to seeing will never be seen again.
That sums up the match day programme or, rather more accurately, the match day piece of paper. On that piece of paper was the Taranaki team and the Hawke’s Bay team, the reserves, the management team and the officials. There was also 93 logos of companies who sponsor Taranaki rugby, with the really important ones getting featured more than once.
No mention of the players in the curtain raiser, no president’s message, no future fixture list, no player profiles, no health and safety plan on how to get out of the stadium in case of an emergency.
It was surprising, really, considering it must be the best medium to get a message across to your fans, although I suspect Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can now do that.
Never mind. Once the real rugby started all was forgotten, a bit like the first half when we were continually reminded over the speaker system that Taranaki Rugby is really grateful to the support of such and such major sponsor over and over and over again.
I’m no marketing genius, I don’t even have a degree in the subject, but I did find it hard to work out why you have a big replay screen that doesn’t show replays? That was especially so when you are trying to figure out if Jonah Lowe had scored his second try.
I’ll have to become a television match official because he was the only person at the ground who got to figure it out. In the end my ‘‘match day experience’’ was made incredibly satisfying by the second half of the rugby which is why I went in the first place.
glenn.mclean@dailynews.co.nz