‘We should go to a rugby game!’ exclaimed my wife.

‘We don’t know anything about rugby,’ I replied.

‘It’ll be fun! I found this video so we can learn! And I already bought tickets!’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I see.’ Like all my ancestors back to Adam, or at least to Falstaff, I understand when the better part of valor is discretion. We were going to a rugby match.

How To Learn Rugby on YouTube

We learned rugby in 15 minutes from this video. The game is more complex than that 15-minute primer and I’ll be damned if I understand half the penalty calls, but I feel that way about the NFL, too, and I just trust the calls of those weird halfbreeds of Jock and Nerd called Referee’s.

For the completely uninitiated, it’s sort of the best parts of soccer and American Football mashed together. They have players of all sizes, from the meatier forwards to the smaller and more nimble backs; the backs still have 50 lbs. on me. There’s no forward passing, so it’s mostly about brute force for it’s own sake, and there’s no stopping the clock just because someone gets hurt. Also, they don’t take ad breaks every time a player breathes. No-one wears safety gear, and no-one complains about concussions, which hearkens back to a more manly, heroic age.

In other news, a note on the structure of rugby in New Zealand: first of all, there are two different kinds of rugby: rugby union and rugby league. Fantastic. Second of all, there are four separate tiers of rugby union in New Zealand alone. Fantastic.

It is the opinion of this reporter that any time a club goes out of business in the world, two more rise to take its place. Additionally, the overlap of European leagues and various other national and international leagues at major or minor levels is far beyond my ken, or the ken of Man Himself, and is probably understood only by some hunched over scribe working in the depths of the Vatican.

None of this is necessary knowledge.

We were going to see Super Rugby Pacific, if that aids you.

Specifically, we went to see the Blues, so we watched a few of their games online. It was fun. I think we got it.

Game Day:

We got to the stadium early, which turned out to be unnecessary. Eden Park can hold up to 50,000 people, but that day it only held maybe 3,000, tops. It was a double header game, so the women played first. Concessions weren’t even open yet, which felt a bit sexist, but they also knew it would run to 9pm and maybe they didn’t want to start selling beer at 3pm. Probably misogyny, though.

Anyway.

The women’s game was pretty great, lots of goals – and every time there was a goal, the pyrotechnics went off. The women’s team smashed whoever it was they were playing against (we never found out…) and after they finished we had about 45 minutes to kill. So we made it up to concessions, which had finally opened. Fish and chips were decent and cheap, beer was surprisingly cheap (11NZD, about 6 USD), but, unfortunately, the beer was produced in the Olde Way, wherein you hire a hobo to whizz in the cans and then sell them to the unsuspecting. I understand this is a tradition in the History of Sport, but I believe it should change.

The men’s game: this was, unfortunately, a very tactical game. It followed a similar structure and plot as the First World War. A man dressed as Spider-Man dropped (read: slowly, very slowly, descended – Ed.) from the stadium ceiling during half-time to throw toys at children, and we learned that the Blues had some kind of business deal with Marvel to wear Spiderman influenced uniforms. This explained why their uniforms were red and blue, instead of just blue. I could say something about advertisers and marketers and middle-management here, but that’s more of a diatribe and this is a thoroughly unbiased report. After that was an announcement about how girls are twice as likely as boys to drop out of sports. This was, it was supposed, a bad thing. I suppose they haven’t heard how more girls are getting a college education than boys now, and will soon out-earn men in many fields. So this announcement did not strike your reporter as quite the tragedy it was intended to be, but rather the opposite. Perhaps we should get the boys to drop out, too, and then they’ll be back in school. I don’t know, and I don’t terribly care. I was about 6 cans of Hobo-Whizz deep at that point.

Anyway. 2^nd Half. This, once again, was like watching WWI, but the Blues just barely edged out the Hurricanes. Just like The Great War, it took entirely too long, didn’t really go anywhere, and no-one went home truly happy.

But that’s a lie. We did! Despite the gripes and the slowness of play, we had a great time. We even got little Blues flags to wave around, and got to yell and cheer and do all those things the Great Apes do. We had an hour-long walk to get back, which we broke up with a cheeky kebab run somewhere in the night, like wayward and feral raccoons…

For 50 NZD and some concession money, it was a worthy experience.

Coming up: One of us writes a diatribe, thoughts on pickles, and tales of the Pigeon-Dancer.