But it’s proven a hard nut to crack in a city where, according to the 2018 census, 42 per cent of the inhabitants were not born in New Zealand, and where increasing numbers of migrants are arriving from countries that have no affinity or previous exposure to rugby.
Auckland’s socio-demographics, ethnic make-up and sheer size give it a different profile to every other city in the country and in many respects, it is closer in character to the major offshore urban centres in which NZR is hoping to establish brand All Blacks and a love of rugby.
Auckland is no longer a city where rugby has natural rights of assumption that kids will default into playing and watching it – not when most schools offer 30-plus sports.
In Auckland, rugby has to fight for players and eyeballs in a way that many provincial centres don’t, and it’s a fight it’s not really winning.
A championship-winning Blues wouldn’t be a silver bullet in this quest to make more Aucklanders fall in love with rugby, but it might at least prompt some mild curiosity among those who have never really taken to or cared about the sport.
It might at least persuade a few more people to get along to Eden Park more regularly because champion teams create more interest and people who know little about rugby are more likely to invest in a sport if the city has a winning team.
For 20 years now, Aucklanders have carried a sense of inevitability that their team will find ways to disappoint, but if the Blues can finally win another title, it may redefine the city’s relationship with them and create new expectations.
Champion teams create a sense of civic pride, and it is certainly easier to believe that kids in Auckland from non-rugby families will give rugby a go if the Blues are the team no one can beat.
But a Blues title would deliver more than hope to NZR that it can succeed in building rugby’s profile and commercial footprint in both Auckland and abroad.
It will, in some small way, give long-suffering Aucklanders a little bit of hope that not everything in their city is broken or pointless, or destined to fail.
Aucklanders need a win of some kind to kill this sense of dread that in 10 years the city will have succumbed to bureaucratic bungling – two million people left looking at broken bridges no one knows how to fix; a waterfront that no one wants to use because it’s been sold to offshore developers to knock up cheap apartments with stunning views of container towers, and no one can go anywhere anyway because the train tracks have melted and the roads are gridlocked by hipsters in their utes.
The rest of the country may hate Auckland, but it would take a cold heart to say that its inhabitants don’t deserve a break – some little moment to celebrate.
When the rest of the country was allowed to go about its business in the last five months of 2021, Aucklanders were barricaded into their city.
The freedoms afforded everyone else were not legal in Auckland and while most of New Zealand felt like New Zealand in those last few months of the pandemic, the city of sails was locked in some dystopian future it genuinely felt it was never going to escape.
And then there were the almost biblical scenes of January 2023 when the city was nearly swept away, and while all parts of the country will feel they have done it hard these last few years, Auckland has perhaps done it hardest.
A Blues victory won’t take the pain away from paying $6 for a coffee, or $9 for a roundtrip into the city on a bus.
It won’t give back the hundreds of hours stuck in traffic or reimburse the consultant’s fees to never make a light rail link, or magically build houses for the thousands who need them.
But a Blues win will offer hope that Auckland’s decline is not terminal and rugby can be a source of unification and inspiration.
