Off the bench: Queue here to find out why you need to stand in line

By CHRIS RATTUE

England used to be the butt of jokes about queues and it was a pretty well deserved reputation.

While I was living there in the 1980s, lining up for everything was a constant source of frustration, yet mirth. Especially in banks, which still seemed to be in quill-and-ink mode while the rest of the world had discovered those handy computer things.

The Poms seemed so used to queuing that you could go into a bank, hop on the end of a queue, then find there was a free window that nobody had bothered going to.

Auckland, though, must be ready to take over as the world capital of queuing. It has undergone some weirdo personality transplant that demands a line of cars or people for virtually anything you want to do.

A few decades ago, we were encouraged to believe that this was a beautiful city which had some of the worldly attractions that make living in crowded spaces good, while offering a lifestyle devoid of the stresses you get living in one of the really crowded places.

Now, if someone from parts foreign asked about the merits of moving to the Queen City, you would have to reply: "Look mate, you'll spend half your life in a traffic jam and you will probably die waiting at a traffic light. You would be better off trying somewhere with a better transport system, like Istanbul or Cairo."

Our penchant for traffic queues seems to have got into other parts of life. There are always long queues in banks, even though you could run the national exchequer with a touch phone and an ATM machine.

A few years ago, Aucklanders went absolutely mad and started lining up to get into pubs, a practice that should be outlawed. I even saw one on St Patrick's Day as people lined up outside an entertainment tent in town, the sort of orderly queue that should be scrutinised by a committee investigating un-Irish activities.

And so on to sport and the obvious question. Why do the people running our stadiums try so hard to persuade us never to return, although inevitably we do, like lambs to the slaughter? It happened again over the Easter weekend, with the public cast as the bunnies.

I got into North Harbour Stadium before the fiasco outside the ground on Friday night, when the Blues beat the Waratahs.

It was later reported that hundreds of punters were forced to queue before getting locked out when there was still space for 2000 more inside.

In an effort to speed things along, the stadium apparently went high-tech and got a bloke with a bucket to collect entrance money.

This is no surprise at all. At a soccer World Cup qualifying game a couple of years ago at the same venue, a blanket was thrown on the ground to collect donations before the gates were thrown open to relieve the crush - which kind of annoyed people who had got there early and paid the full whack (I assume the donations consisted of small coins, pebbles, bottle tops, you know the drill).

And all this pain in the name of the All Whites playing the ever-popular Papua New Guineans.

At the Blues-Waratahs game, people went to extraordinary lengths to get fleeced at the drink and food counters with a queue stretching half the length of the grandstand. It reminded me of a similar queue that waited to get tickets behind the new stand at Eden Park a week earlier, although the Blues apparently went to lengths to prevent such problems at that match against the Chiefs.

People have talked about the traffic problems at North Harbour Stadium, but that is the least of their worries. It was pretty much a doddle driving away from the ground. It was trying to get into it that turned out to be the real test for some people.

There were reports of still more queues at Eden Park during the cricket, for tickets and even food that turned out to have run out.

I can report there were no such queues at the beer counter in the new stand, which is hardly surprising, since they were charging $4.50 for the privilege of drinking a thimbleful of the stuff.

There were big crowds at the Super 12 over Easter, as the New Zealand teams restored some of the honour lost by administrators who couldn't run a chook raffle.

The clincher was those gallant Crusaders' eking out a win over the champion Brumbies. The Aussie wonders may have looked a touch more dangerous. But this was a game where Patton, as in the American general nicknamed "Old Blood'n'Guts", triumphed over pattern, as in the clinical way the Brumbies dissect most sides.

The battle-hardened Crusaders provided the All Blacks with a little prod about how football games can be won.

Hopefully, those queues of rejected fans outside North Harbour Stadium will have given the people running sport in this country a prod in the right direction too.