Phillips on... good causes, a prop star and no-alcohol trial
position, the amount of caps he picked up with Wales and the Lions, everything he’s achieved in the game, I think he is a little bit of a one-off.
The word legend is used a bit much but I think he is a legend of the Welsh game.
It’s great that he’s going into coaching and some of the players I’ve talked to believe he’s got a lot of the attributes to potentially become a very good coach so I really want to wish him the best with that and thank him for everything he’s done for Welsh rugby.
HOW THE ALCOHOL-FREE ZONE WILL WORK
The key thing is that there are 4,200 seats. We’ve chosen this part of the ground because we can segregate it relatively easily.
The way it’s supposed to work is that people won’t be allowed to bring alcoholic drinks to their seats.
We’re pretty confident through stewarding that we’ll be able to achieve that.
We’ve generally upgraded the food offer at this end of the ground so it will give customers more choice, with more soft drinks etc and different types of food. We’ll get across on matchday and talk to supporters and find out what they think of it, and what can be better.
I’m quite interested to see the demographic. Will there be loads of families? Is it an older or younger demographic? None of us really know. That’s going to be interesting to see what it looks like and in the end how many tickets are actually sold.
WILL IT BE WELL RECEIVED BY FANS?
We’ve got a fair bit of data on it so we know it’ll probably be about half full. We may get a few more sales but of the 4,200 there’ll be around 2,500.
We know from previous surveys that there is a segment of supporters who want to have an alcohol-free experience if you want to call it that.
The bit I think that will be interesting is, a lot of people have drinks before they get in, and I think one of the main complaints is people getting up and down when people are watching the game. Whether this eradicates that, we don’t know.
I think it’s a really meaningful trial. It’s across four games so we’re going to learn an awful lot. We’ve just got to be open to what we’ve learnt and make sure we develop it from there once we’ve got some sort of firm conclusions.