
I am a pinot-Wah who, last century, used to be the typical Speights-drinking rugby-supporting Scarfie.
Speights got left behind as I aged, moved cities, became employed and had a family. In fact, before the rise of craft beer, beer was increasingly left behind as I became that next cliché, the red-wine and whiskey drinking middle class – and increasingly middle-aged – rugby fan. But something else changed, just as I lost my taste for Speights, I increasingly, if more slowly, lost my taste for rugby. I would still go to the pub of rugby, or more often the televised off-licence, but what was on offer was increasingly the sporting equivalent of Speights. Great when you are young and part of a community of the likeminded, all using it to fuel social lubrication; but away from that time and location it doesn’t taste like I thought it did – if it ever did.
I clung on, buying season tickets to the big local booze barn of rugby, but it increasingly became more an exercise in nostalgia recovery than proper enjoyment and interest. I took my kids, but they increasingly swore off the booze – or rather, didn’t like the taste of the beer of rugby. It seemed a game out of touch, a game lacking the meaning, purpose and interest that its promotion claimed it had. In fact, I wonder if rugby in NZ is headed the way of the mainstream breweries in a word of craft beers? Of course, there are the All Blacks and their associated brand Steinlager, but the thing is I don’t know anyone who drinks Steinlager by choice except when they go to a rugby test. And when there – as I was at the All Blacks-Wallabies test in Wellington this year – you realise why. Bland, inoffensive, but hardly attention catching it was drunk because it was the only beer on offer – but before and after everyone was drinking versions of craft beer, or red wine.
The All Blacks are themselves now rather like Steinlager – brewed for an export audience and for corporate promotions, but increasingly losing their local market share and market interest. As for the next levels of rugby, these seems to have slipped to the level of interest of big brewery beer that is increasingly only bought by the old version of New Zealand, or those who wish to see NZ go back there.
Yet while my taste for rugby steadily declined, I found I was, over the past couple of decades, switching my taste and interest to two competing codes and formats: the NRL and the A-league football. What’s interesting is that these involved true fandom, as my interest and allegiance hasn’t wavered, despite the seasons of my two teams – the Wahs in the NRL and the Nix in the A-League, never bringing the level of success a fan desires. But it is the drama of the games themselves, the drama of the competition, the fans, and the TV commentary (especially the NRL) that pull you in and keep you there year after year. Put bluntly, the NRL is now a far superior game and product to rugby and Super Rugby; and the A-league, very poor cousin to the EPL that it is, provides weekly local drama from October to May (or spring to autumn). Like the NRL, what fascinates me about the A-league is how the game itself and the weekly games actually mean something to the fans (me included); they are events to be looked forward to (or dreaded). So, what was a weekly ritual of rugby watching has declined to the point where this year, for the first time since the forerunner of the NPC began in 1976, I didn’t watch a single NPC match, and I struggled to maintain interest in Super Rugby. It’s become the equivalent of drinking non-craft beer; why would I if I can now drink something far more interesting and tasty?
On Saturday I took my almost 15-year old youngest daughter to the Kiwis-Kangaroos test here in Christchurch. She is a total NRL fan, already aiming to work in marketing and promotion for an NRL team. Her fandom (almost) puts mine (and my wife’s) to shame; while our house is a Wahs house, it is over Origin split between the Blues (me and my wife) and the Maroons (her) – and schadenfreude is on high rotation. She has gone to many rugby games with me when she was younger, and to All Blacks tests as well, but as she discovered league and started watching it seriously (which does not mean quietly) her tolerance for what she sees as the slow, bland, boring product of rugby has quickly disappeared. She likes the drama, the action, the skills, the marketing and product of league; the way the game is constantly in motion and the investment of fans in the game and the outcome; the ways players and coaches seem to have personality in a way rugby players don’t.
We thoroughly enjoyed the test, even though the kiwis lost. The crowd was totally different to a test rugby crowd; more diverse, more enjoyable, accepting of all ages and members, far less angry or violent, far more funny. Rugby crowds now tend to be largely silent or angry, there is always the sense of a seething undercurrent of barely repressed violence and misogyny. There was also no Mexican wave, that blight of every rugby game over the past 20 years. I wonder if Mexican waves at rugby matches are themselves the sign of crowd boredom and dissatisfaction with a game that increasingly is variously either rule-book driven stop-start, ploddingly meandering or headless-chicken-like schoolboy rugby wannabes?
In contrast the league test was full of drama, movement, spectacle and pace; moments of brilliance and despair: brutality, bravery and poetry combined. Every contact, every pass, every kick, is an anticipation full of possibilities, where tactics, vision and skilful decision making under pressure are constantly evident – or suddenly, horribly, lacking. If in rugby, time seems too often to slow or stall, in league time is fleeting in its intensity. If rugby is still Speights or Steinlager, league is now excellent craft beer or a consistently good red wine. Having lost one faith, I’ve discovered another – or rather two with the addition of the Nix and the A-League. Once I was lost, but now I’m twice found, was blinded by boredom but now I twice see… it’s the altar call of the Wahs and the Nix for me.