You can still get tickets to see Australia’s best chance in 50 dog years to win a Bledisloe Cup match. Riding a wave of Tah love, Sydneysiders have the chance to see a once-in-a-generation event either way, whether it’s a Wallabies win or New Zealand’s 18th on the trot. The X-Factor has been selected. Don’t hold back, go to the website, choose from about 15,000 remaining seats. Take your family. It’ll only set you back … ah right, here’s another item to add to #OtherThingsThePoorDontDo. In fact, if former Sydney University rugby club treasurer Joe Hockey had slapped an excise on Wallabies ticket prices, nobody could say it wasn’t progressive.
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Ticket prices to most premium sporting events are as scandalous as an NSW politician taking a bribe. That is, they hardly raise an eyebrow, and rugby oughtn’t be singled out. Whether it’s league, AFL, cricket, football or any big sport, the public has been beaten to a pulp over the past two decades and now assumes the position. It’s a global phenomenon. At the museum of the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street in London, there’s a display on inflation since the 1950s. The prices of a bus ticket, a litre of milk and rent on a flat, most goods and services have all gone up by factors of eight to 30. The price of a top-league football ticket has gone up by 300 to 500 times, outstripping the inflation rate more than tenfold.
Most English Premier League clubs get away with it, and could even get away with more, such is the demand. But in a worrying number of Australian sporting events, the price mechanism has gone amiss. The ugliest sight at a big event is empty seats. A match as anticipated and historic as the Bledisloe Cup opener should fill the Olympic Stadium, but it won’t. Why? Well, if you want to go with one friend in Category A seats, you will pay close to $400, including mandatory booking fees and the agency’s so-called cost of sending you your ticket by email. For your night out, that $400 will include your train or bus fare but not your $9 beers and your $6 pies. If you want to take a child, you must pay the full freight of $179 (plus fees), as there are no child seats in the best sections. Or, you could choke it right down and take your family (of four) to Category C seats, high in the upper tiers or around the corners, for $282. Or you could go with the really poor families into Category D, where you might as well be watching from the Goodyear blimp, for just $200.
For the true believers, paying $400 for two seats is chump change when it comes to witnessing history – even if that translates to more than $10 per minute of rugby. At the game, you will be growing poorer as fast as Gina Rinehart is growing richer. This gets close to why most of the rugby fans I know, who might otherwise have been helping to fill the stadium, will be watching on TV. They would be happy to pay big dollars to watch a game like this. They would be happy to pay to watch the schools, sub-district and lower-level rugby they flock to every weekend and get to watch for free. Rugby must be the only sport where thousands of followers will assure you that the schoolboy and suburban version is an infinitely more exciting spectacle than the professional version. Scots College parents, for instance, think they are watching a team better than the All Blacks every weekend.
Yet for every one aficionado who will be going to Homebush, there are hundreds who will prefer to watch the Test from home. They drive cars, they even drive them to the western suburbs, they’re that rich. It’s just that they aren’t keen to pay to watch scrums being packed and re-packed, injuries being tended to, kicks being lined up and taken, referees discoursing to front rows, or players simply pausing en masse to take a drink. All while the clock keeps running. They just aren’t keen to pay such high prices to watch 38 minutes of play.
The rule changes for the National Rugby Championship, altering the points for penalty goals and conversions, and several other abstruse matters, may or may not have the desired effect on cynical play, may or may not be adopted by the International Rugby Board (and pigs may or may not fly), and may or may not reduce the impact of referees on results, but in spirit they show a code that is waking up to the 21st century. They have been made in response to public petitioning. Rugby, or at least Australian rugby, is listening. As the fourth-rating football code, it has no other choice.
Ewen McKenzie’s selection of Kurtley X. Beale no doubt has nothing to do with staving off the leaguies or jazzing up the Wallabies’ style of play. It’s certainly a tough call on poor Bernard Foley, the Ed Cowan of Australian rugby. But if Beale’s selection were influenced by those crowd-pleasing factors, then all the better. You would almost pay to watch him. Maybe just not quite as much as is being asked.
Australian rugby is doing the right thing, growing a pair of ears. What it needs now is to grow a thumb, and stick it on the stop button when the ball is out of play. The AFL fits 80 minutes of play into 130 minutes, and gives the public value for its money. Rugby league and football keep the ball in play and stop the clock wherever possible. For many of those who are not travelling to Homebush, three words could redeem rugby and make those ticket prices more justifiable: Stop, The, and Clock.
