Dialogue: Patience thins as Chiefs' stadium lags way behind

By PATRICK GOWER

So, how about those Chiefs? Might be time to get a season ticket for the NPC if they can play half as well this season.

Well ... no ... maybe not. Why? Because this year Hamilton's Rugby Park won't have any rugby and, hell, it isn't even really a park any more. It is a "stadium."

The coach might be a genius, captain Deon Muir the game's great street-fighter and the tyros may have stepped up a level and the veterans reinvented themselves, but the rugby scribes have missed the true disaster of the season.

If Mark Cooksley was the biggest piece of scrap to ever climb off the rugby scrap-heap, he will be pushed hard by the paddock he's meant to be running around on later this year, which now looks a lot like a stage one BMX track.

Grass on the $25 million stadium's new pitch isn't expected to be ready as promised to host Waikato's second home game against Wellington on August 24.

It now looks as if the mooloo bells will be ringing at Northern District's nearby cricket ground, WestpacTrust Park, for up to five of this season's NPC games as work on the stadium lags even further behind schedule.

Not that anybody seems ready to admit that, though - efforts to buy a season ticket from the Waikato Rugby Union over the past two days have left one with news that "the information isn't prepared yet" and instructions to hit up a website or even dial up an answerphone later in the year. Any further queries, the union said, could be directed to a marketing manager.

No thanks. It is all pretty secret-squirrel and serious because every game they miss, in the eyes of the stadium and rugby administrators, is more money pouring down the (unfinished?) drainage system of the new stadium.

For the record, the stadium managers, chairmen, bosses or whatever say they "can't confirm or deny" what will happen.

But it is, of course, about much more than gate takings - through the eyes of the punters, the delay is much, much worse. The old Rugby Park might not have been anything flash, but at least you could watch a game of rugby on it.

Many fans were happy to trek to Chiefs' home games in Rotorua this year knowing that, finally, later this year there would be a first-class ground to come home to. But now there might not be.

Will a rot set in among the fans? I picked up the phone book and rang the Waikato Rugby Supporters Club to find out. The number had been disconnected - not a very good sign. I will go, though, and many other rugby diehards will trudge along to the grass embankments to watch the boys in the red, black and yellow hoops slip all over the wicket block.

The other question is, does it really matter? Is Rugby Park really the spiritual home ground it is cracked up to be?

It could that the Chiefs' sterling turnaround and the home games at Roto-Vegas are no coincidence at all. Should we play our home games out of the region all the time, like in Westport, or should the Waikato team turn out at Steele Park with just a piece of rope between players and supporters and no posts?

No, because a home ground does matter. Home games mean something. Supporters won't just suffer in silence. Holdups are holdups, and delays are delays, but a promise is also a promise and these ones get broken day by day.

Home grounds have history. One thing the site will be all right for is the 20th anniversary of the cancelled 1981 Springbok match on July 25; protesters who choose to revisit the site (bring gumboots) will be pleased to find it empty bar a few people in hard hats and still looking like a bomb has hit it.

In those amateur days, the geriatric old farts who ran the game would go to ridiculous lengths to cut off their noses to spite their faces if it meant getting a team on the paddock to kick a ball around.

Those bullish and blind administrators would now be turning in their graves (or armchairs), their only solace that in New Zealand the people's game is still being poorly run by equally blind administrators who have put their own interests first.

Patience with rugby's "management" runs to an increasingly thinning edge among the grassroots of the game and these delays and the way they have been shrouded in secrecy will cost them dearly, in both revenue and support.

It is only a small step from "Rugby Parks" becoming "stadiums" to "the game" becoming "the product" and "fans" becoming "customers."

They used to say, "Build it and they will come" - but in the case of this stadium it is, "You should have finished on time and we would be there."