Ask an Aussie: McLean Park’s a perfect track for good rugby league

The Broncos at McLean Park with police, ambulance, fire and civil defence personnel involved in the Cyclone Gabrielle emergency over the last three months. Photo / Doug Laing

The turf at McLean Park in Napier has got the big tick of approval from the first Australian team to play since the year one of the last went home without a game and sent Hawke’s Bay into a costly tailspin over the ground’s future six years ago.

The new praise came from Brisbane Broncos rugby league coach Kevin Walters after his team’s training run ahead of Saturday night’s NRL match against the One New Zealand Warriors.

“This is a great stadium,” he told Hawke’s Bay Today, in an unsolicited comment in front of the park’s Harris Stand and an array of police, ambulance and fire officers and others who worked through the emergency of Cyclone Gabrielle three months ago, including at least one who had lost their own home.

“It’s a perfect pitch to play good rugby league,” said Walters, who played more than 240 matches for the Broncos and who has coached Queensland in the State of Origin. “It’s great that it’s sold out.”

Brisbane Broncos coach and Australian rugby league icon Kevin Walters, who says McLean Park is a "great stadium" and perfect for the big match against the Warriors on Saturday night. Photo / Brisbane Broncos

And so it – or more particularly the playing surface about which he was most impressed – should be, for it cost about $2 million to get it back into the good books after a one-day cricket match between the New Zealand Black Caps and Australia was cancelled without a ball being bowled in February 2017, because of a damp patch exposed by deteriorating drainage.

With just one other visit by an Australian team since – soon afterwards in 2017 by the ACT Brumbies for a Super Rugby match against the Hurricanes – should be in great order, for it cost $2 million to rip it up, lay a new drainage system and relay with a new hybrid turf, and allow for a drop-in cricket pitch about here kick-off on the winter-strip at 7.30pm.

Walters even detected a bit of a rugby league” feel about the park, which hasn’t otherwise seen rugby league since the 2015 NRL match between Melbourne Storm and Sydney side St George Illawarra Dragons, and he wasn’t surprised to hear that the ground was at least a spiritual base for struggling Hawke’s Bay rugby league, to which it was allocated over a century ago in the infancy of the game in New Zealand.

He reckoned it “definitely” seemed like the “ghosts of rugby league 1910″ were still hanging around, although it has since been the home of rugby union and its Hawke’s Bay Magpies.