Boozy fans led Wales great John Taylor to walk out of stadium
WALES and Lions great John Taylor has revealed he walked out of the Australia game at half-time because of the behaviour of fans around him.
He says it was impossible to watch the match earlier this month because of the constant stream of people going back and fore to the bar, spilling beer along the way.
In the end, he and Cardiff board member Martyn Ryan opted to leave and they watched the second half of Wales’ victory on television.
There have been numerous complaints over the drunken and obnoxious behaviour of some fans inside the Principality Stadium during the autumn campaign, with the story of a six-year-old boy being vomited on resulting in particular outrage.
Now former flanker Taylor, a Grand Slam winner with Wales and a Test series winner with the Lions in New Zealand, has added his voice to the chorus of disapproval.
Reflecting on being at the Wallabies match on November 20, he said: “It really was a bad experience.
“It got to the point where we actually quit at half-time and went and watched it on the television.
“It was just impossible to watch the match because there was a constant stream of people who were up and down the aisles.
“Most of them couldn’t remember what row they had been in and were looking out for their mates who they were taking the beers back to.
“They can not have seen more than 10 minutes of rugby because they were up and down the aisles all the time.
“There was one guy who came past us three times, spilling beer from his tray of four pints along the way. He couldn’t remember what blooming row he was in!
“Three or four times, it was close to somebody capsizing their tray of booze and going all over us.
“So one got wary and you don’t want to be worrying about things like that when you are watching rugby.
“The language wasn’t good either. The fact that one accepts it as the norm is an indictment of how bad it’s all got.
“I wondered if it was maybe just me being a bit of a grumpy old man. But then we got to half-time and Martyn said ‘I don’t think I can take much more of this’. I said ‘Oh blimey, it’s not just me’. So we left. It’s sad, but it really was impossible. You just could not watch the game.
“If you take it purely from a customer experience, it was really poor when you are talking about tickets being £90 or whatever.”
The 26-times capped Taylor feels the situation inside the stadium has been deteriorating in recent times.
“The last time I was down, just before the pandemic, it was not good either,” said the London-based 76-year-old. “I have certainly got the feeling that it has very definitely got worse in Cardiff over the past few years. It is more of a beer-fest than ever it was before.
“This business of people constantly getting up and down during the game is something that is getting worse.
“Bear in mind, most of my life I have been largely sheltered and protected from it because I’ve been in the press box or the committee box. I have been experiencing the real world recently. Maybe I was living in a bit of a bubble before, but it certainly appears to me to have got a lot worse.
“When I have mentioned it in passing to fairly senior members of the Union there has been a sort of wry smile and ‘We make an awful lot of money out of booze’. It was almost like ‘What are we meant to do’?
“I don’t know whether it’s practical to close the bars during the actual game. In football, you are not allowed to take drinks to your seats. Much as we would love to take the moral high ground of saying that’s not necessary in rugby, I think it fast is becoming necessary.
“I saw the article about the young lad who someone was sick all over, which is just awful. The Union responded by saying it’s only a couple of per cent of people who are a problem. Well, it was more than that in terms of anti-social behaviour. I think we were talking about 20 or 30 per cent and that’s huge.”
Taylor continued: “It is becoming a perpetual problem. It has certainly put me off going to watch in that way. I really don’t fancy being where I was, in the upper tiers on the halfway line. With the volume of traffic at that part of the stand, I would not want to be there again.”
Taylor, a long-time TV commentator, was also concerned about Covid precautions inside the ground.