Dave Mollard’s change is constant: My game is dying and I blame everyone

Thank goodness women’s rugby is growing fast! E tū wāhine toa. Photo / Dean Purcell

OPINION:

The game I love is dying a death by 1000 cuts. On and off for the past 15 years I have played rugby in the Manawatū Rugby senior third grade. I started in this grade playing for Old Boys Marist and there were 12 teams in the grade spread from up in the mountains of Kimbolton, across to tropical Pahiatua and down to the bog of Rongotea.

It was a great grade full of little idiosyncrasies. Bush would always default on the opening day of duck hunting season, Bulls were strong at home but weak on the road and Linton were either really strong or really weak depending on what operations the army was committed to. The country clubs always put on a good meal, the city ones were below average and Varsity meals were non-existent because the students were too poor.

Ashhurst would turn up with 13 players and still put up a massive fight. The passenger train always blew its horn as it chugged past the Halcombe ground at 4pm.

Ten years ago, we could not get enough players for Marist to field a team so a few of us moved to College Old Boys for a season before that great club also could not get enough players. We then moved to our now spiritual home of Lincoln Park for Ashhurst Pohangina, a club I immediately fell in love with.

The difference was that the senior thirds team at Ashhurst was the top team, no hand-me-downs, no playing at windswept Ongley Park for home games and no bowing down to the lads in the premier team. We have our own loyal fans who turn up to stand under the clubroom verandah every week, yelling support and advice but also discussing farming conditions, hunting and the price of milk.

We put on a great meal for our visitors and tell tall stories about the heroic actions we performed just an hour before. In our minds we were every bit as skilled and strong as the professionals, it was just the referee’s calls that let us down.

Every season for the past few years the grade has shrunk by a team annually. Freyberg, Bush, Bulls, Halcombe, Feilding Old Boys, Te Kawau. This year the pace of decline has sped up with Kia Toa, Feilding Yellows, Linton and possibly Varsity not being able to put together teams. It’s just us, the mighty Ashhurst Stags, and arch-rivals Bunnythorpe left to fight over the Life Members Trophy.

My game is dying due to 1000 tiny social and demographic changes that have persuaded young men there are better things they can do with their Saturday afternoons than chase each other around a muddy field. I don’t blame anyone, I blame everyone, because we as a community have changed, not for better or worse, just changed.

I see a time very soon that rugby in Aotearoa will follow the American football model of having a professional league, a semi-pro competition and one team per high school grade, that’s it.

The small country rugby clubrooms will soon join the rundown bowling clubs, racing tracks and Scout halls that lie abandoned around our region, a crumbling shrine to the dead gods of rugby, racing and beer.

Thank goodness women’s rugby is growing fast! E tū wāhine toa.

Dave Mollard is a Palmerston North community worker and social commentator.