Small but strong club gets its juniors to World Cup match

Photo / NZ Herald

This World Cup, John Roughan tours the North Island to capture the spirit of rugby's heartland

The boys at the Ngatapa club in Poverty Bay go a long way to play rugby. Twice a week their dedicated parents drive up to 100km, there and back, from farms and hamlets in the hill country.

Even the Under-11s come all this way for training on a Thursday as well as for games on Saturday.

This winter, the boys and parents have stayed late to cook hot meals for the club's two senior teams that trained on the same night.

The money they raised has paid for tickets to Rotorua Stadium where the boys will see their adopted team, Namibia, play its first game in the World Cup.

Parent Mike Kingi says, "Some of these kids have never been away. They'll remember this for the rest of their lives."

Kingi and other fathers knew the meals would sell because many of the senior players are shepherds on outlying stations, who travel just as far as the boys. Most are single and go home to cold, empty houses.

The senior players happily paid a few dollars for the roasts, stir fry or four-course hangi. The boys worked the roster for nine weeks and reached their target. Look for them on Saturday when Namibia play Fiji. There will be 22 kids in the crowd wearing Ngatapa's green and white.

It is a proud club - you will quickly hear Ian Kirkpatrick started there. He is still in the district, the club patron. His collection of international jerseys adorns the clubrooms' wall.

They claim Lawrie Knight, too, and Brett Codlin, Gordon MacPherson, Hamish MacDonald. All of them, Kirkpatrick included, made the All Blacks from other provinces but that is Poverty Bay's fate.

"We are a feeder union," says the PBRU's chief executive Mark Weatherall. And yet Poverty Bay is almost alone among World Cup host unions, he believes, in having to underwrite the cost of being a team base. In other places he believes councils are carrying the bulk of it.

It's an added burden for a union in the third-tier Heartland Championship. Weatherall says it costs $140,000 just to host a visiting team like Wanganui that walloped Poverty Bay 58-13 last Saturday. There is no income from gates.

About a quarter of the union's income comes from revenue generated by the All Blacks and passed down by the NZRU. They get the rest from local business sponsors and grants.

Poverty Bay's World Cup steering committee is doing it well, though. And its guest team, Namibia, have responded to the welcome.

The former South African territory has just two million people and its indebted rugby union had to be rescued by the International Rugby Board this year. In Gisborne this week, its players, white Afrikaans-speakers mostly, have been frequently seen around town and welcomed approaches.

Captain Jacques Burger, formerly of the Bulls, now Saracens in England, looked up a nearly deserted main street and said he was finding Gisborne very quiet but not cold. He and a few teammates were thinking of going surfing.

Today they were to move on to Rotorua. First though, they would take a trip into the country and meet those boys at Ngatapa.