Grounds for complaint
A Scottish rugby tragedy gets even messier, and more feral crowd behaviour
Bit of a holding newsletter until we get closer to a weekend where Ian Foster and the All Blacks run out onto the old Addington Showgrounds, New Zealand’s increasingly unloved “temporary” venue.
Foster’s not sure if he personally will feel the love, which is a little sad - much like the creaking, decrepit stadium.
This is all serving as a tease for the second of Brian Finn’s “one-off” features on the state of our stadium infrastructure. In the piece, which will hit your inboxes on Thursday, he digs into the history of the country’s stadium development and how that’s contributed to the mess we have now.
“By the 1970s and 80s, population growth allied to more sport called for larger venues so embankments were replaced and new stands and seating added. In that classic Kiwi fashion, instead of remodelling we did a bit of homespun renovation by changing out an old stand here and there for a new one. This, by and large, is how all of our stadia were modernised and ‘improved’.”
Which leads me a little clumsily and a little sadly to one of my happy places.
It’s a pity that in a province that had Think Big foisted upon them in the 1980s has thought so small when it comes to a genuine jewel in the crown, Pukekura Park.
The iconic cricket ground is about to lose its status on the domestic circuit due to poor facilities and boundaries that have been rendered undefendable in the modern era of big bats and biceps.
It never had to be this way. Conversations were taking place in the mid-80s about how to extend the ground to ensure a rich future for one of the most beautiful cricket venues in the world but council after council after council kicked the can down Liardet St. The solutions were actually quite simple from an engineering perspective. It’s the politics that are difficult.
Fillis St at the city end of the ground could easily be modified into a one-way lane, which would have benefits beyond the cricket ground. There is an access road on the western side of the ground (pictured above) that doesn’t need to be there as there is another access road at the racecourse end of the ground that would be sufficient.
The walking concourse could easily be designed to traverse the tops of the terraces, not below them. The grounds sit in a massive park so entrance points are not a problem.
None of those simple fixes would in any way change the character of the park. In fact it would likely enhance it and there are clever people out there who would be able to figure out a way of moving the memorial gates without destroying them.
Rather than thinking about retaining the ground for domestic cricket, successive generations of local burghers could have been thinking about how to get New Plymouth, the St Tropez of the south, on the international circuit. The stunning beauty of the ground deserves it.
But they thought small instead.
If there is a potential uptick in the shemozzle, however, it is that the ground could become a standout venue for the women’s game - though there still needs to be a bunch of money spent on the spartan facilities.
There’s an old-world charm to Pukekura Park.
There was a new-money charmlessness about the boxing on Sunday.
Anthony Joshua and Oleksandr Usyk put on a very good world heavyweight championship fight. It was more science than outright violence and might have fallen short of great, but it was still a fascinating scrap.
An apologetic Joshua behaved like a bit of a tit afterwards...
…While Ukrainian Usyk used the bout to platform both his extraordinary skills and his country’s continued fight for survival.
So why did it feel like much less of an event than it should have; far less than the Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder trilogy, for example.
My guess: the venue.
This is not going to be another treatise on the effectiveness of sports washing, you can read about that here, but King Abdullah Sports City indoor arena in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, provided a super-flat atmosphere that flat out sucked the life out of the event.
Hell of an interesting story brewing in Scottish rugby.
The Times ($) recently reported on the sudden death of Siobhan Cattigan, whose family believe it was a direct result of brain injuries she suffered while playing for Scotland.
It was a tragic story that highlighted the struggle she had finding help for a hard-to-define injury. It painted the high-performance wing of women’s rugby in Scotland in a poor light.
Never mind, the Players’ Association came to the rescue, saying the players were “upset” at the idea that the care provided by the Scottish Rugby Union was less than “excellent”.
Bill Mitchell, the head of the players’ association, said: “We cannot and will not challenge what the Cattigans believe [but] what we can do is put forward our understanding of how this squad experience playing for Scotland, and the support they receive… the healthcare they receive is excellent, the pastoral care is excellent, and they are upset at the inference that can be drawn that it was less than that.”
But were they actually upset at that inference?
Despite appearing to speak on behalf of the squad, more than 20 players, including the captain Rachel Malcolm, rejected it via a uniform Twitter statement: “We were unaware of this RPS article being published, or the statements attributed to the team in this article. We are grieving our friend and teammate, our thoughts are with Siobhan’s family.”
Here’s a big interview ahead of the release of Ben Stokes: Phoenix from the Ashes, a documentary screening on Amazon Prime.
In it Stokes talked about his mental health as being like a glass bottle. He’d keep putting stuff in the bottle until it shattered, leaving him panic-stricken and on the point of walking away from the sport he has helped transform.
The death of father Ged, a Kiwi rugby league coach, is discussed, as is the Bristol street fight in 2017 that saw him on trial for affray. That incident left him with a lasting, unkind impression of the media, which was exacerbated when The Sun ran a story about his mother Deborah’s family tragedy.
“When I say the media are pieces of shit, it’s that they jumped to conclusions [about Bristol]. I’m not the type of person to play out a vendetta publicly – it’s my moral high ground. But there was stuff people, certain people, journalists, outlets had but chose not to put out there because it didn’t reflect the way I was being written about.”
Genuine question: are crowds in Australia and New Zealand getting more feral or are phones just highlighting a bubbling undercurrent of boozed up boofheads that have always existed?
The ugly scenes from the dramatic Collingwood-Carlton AFL clash are just the latest to blight Australian sport this year, while we had our own dramas at the Kiwis-Tonga test at Mt Smart.
THANKS!
Thanks for all the messages of support following my Sunday splash. Much appreciated.
To answer your last question, I'm pretty sure it's the phones. Whenever I went to an ODI at Maclean Park in Napier, there was almost always a punch-up between some drunken idiots on the terrace during the last couple of overs.