The Blog of Hubbers

Earlier this year Grant, Cam, Russ and I purchased tickets to the Ireland, Wales and England rugby tests against the All Black in the UK this November.

The purchase was made through Sports Tickets International Limited who are, according to their site, the Officially Licensed Match Ticket Company of the New Zealand Rugby Union (”NZRU”).

The total amount that my Visa was charged was 922.85 but when I picked up my tickets yesterday the face value of all 12 tickets came to a meagre £632. This means that STIL added on a whopping 46% to the price of the tickets!

That is one hell of a mark-up!

This table shows the breakdown.

Naturally I have emailed them to find out what is going on.

STIL have replied

STIL have added a handling fee to the face value of each ticket. This fee covers the cost of making this facility available (including website and software charges, travel, administration, wages and processing fees), and as a result the face value of the tickets will not equate with the amount charged. Any income, which remains at the end of this project, once all costs have been paid, will be returned to the NZRU to assist with the development of Rugby in New Zealand.

I have copied and pasted the below from the Terms & Conditions Page on the STIL website, hope this helps.

http://www.stilrugby.wb.gs/book-tickets.html

How much money do STIL make?

If we assume that our tickets are the average price then STIL is making roughly £25 per ticket. If we also assume that they have 5000 tickets per game to sell then they will have 25000 tickets which means that they will take £625,000 or 1,766,519 New Zealand Dollars (today’s exchange rate is 2.826) to perform the duties mentioned above.

I am pretty sure that I could do it all for less than that.

I have emailed them again and asked them how much money is returned to NZRU for the development of NZ rugby.

STIL have replied again. In answer to the preceding question they said:

The breakdown is about 50/50

So NZRU get nearly ONE MILLION NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS for the development of NZ rugby which is good. And it costs STIL nearly ONE MILLION NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS to sell Kiwis in the UK tickets to 5 games of rugby.

So I asked STIL

So you are saying that it costs nearly one million New Zealand dollars to provide tickets for New Zealand fans for 5 games of rugby?

And they threatened me with this email:

Carl

I am not sure where you are getting your figures from and where you are going with this, but we will not be following any further line of communication.

If you like, we will take you off our database, and recommend you purchase your tickets direct from the host unions in future.

Kind regards

Margaret Faisandier
Sports Tickets International Ltd
The Official match Ticket Licensee of the NZ Rugby Union

You know what I am getting at Margaret Faisandier, you are profiteering from loyal All Black fans!!!

My next question is: Is there an open and transparent tender process for the job of selling tickets to UK fans? I think I would like to apply.

I am not sure how I have lived in London for over 10 years and have never taken any notice of the London Marathon. This year a good friend ran so we were forced to sit up and take notice. It was an awesome day that was well worth getting off the couch for :)

One of the things that really impressed me is the large number of people who run in costume. Some do it because it is fun but I suspect most do it as part of their sponsorship arrangements. Like the guy dressed as Borat in the photo below.

Through the miracle of public transport we managed to see Cam in three different places during the run, at the Cutty Sark, Canark Wharf and finally at Tower Hill. Every time we saw him we yelled and screamed support and offered beer.

One of the other things that really surprised me was that a lot of runners put their names on the front of their shirts and a lot of spectators yelled support to runner they didn’t know if they though they looked like they needed a boost. That was something that was very cool about the marathon, how people reached out to complete strangers when they were really suffering.

Cam finished his first marathon without stopping to walk once in 4 hours and 13 minutes and he raised £3600 for prostate cancer. An awesome effort.

Rachel and I went down to Russell Square to see the Olympic Torch march and associated protests. Hundreds of protesters turned up to make their voices heard.

Naturally the police were out in force to make sure the torch reached it’s goal and to stop any trouble.

What really surprised me was the large number of pro-Chinese people there.

Many of the China supporters were very vocal and more than happy to argue their case. Their arguments came down to a few main points:

• Sport and politics should be separate
• Tibetans kill Chinese people you can see it on Youtube
• You haven’t been to China so you can’t have an opinion

These seriously were the points made by many seemingly educated young Chinese men and women as a justification for the recent violent actions of the Chinese government. The irony of engaging in vigorous debate to support a regime that violently suppresses all dissenting views was lost on them.

Personally I think we are all lucky to be living in a country where people can have a vigorous and heated debate on the side of the road.

This is my favourite photo of the day. It makes me wonder if the huge number of police present are part of the Chinese dream.

It’s going to be an interesting year for all involved and sadly I don’t think we have seen the end of the blood.

The main lessons that all All Blacks supporters must learn are the following

1. Don’t count your chickens
2. Don’t count your chickens

I think that is pretty much all of the important things.

Gripe about the quality of the tickets

When we purchased our tickets for the Cup we opted to pay the extra money and get the second best of the four categories available. This led to us getting some great seats and some pretty dismal seats. In some stadiums like Marseilles and Toulouse we had amazing seats. But in Lyon, Edinburgh and Cardiff we were stuffed up behind the goal posts on the lower levels. They were hardly the second best seats available in those stadiums as it is very difficult to understand what is going on in a game of rugby from seats like these. The root of the problem seems to be that some stadiums like Marseilles seem to have a clear understandable hierarchy of good seats and bad seats. Some other stadiums like Cardiff and Edinburgh you can end up sitting almost anywhere regardless of what you pay. My personal conspiracy theory is that this is done by home stadiums to charge away fans a premium price and still give them rubbish seats.

These pictures should show you what I mean. The first one is Marseilles and is pretty good. The last two are Cardiff and Edinburgh and the good seats are all over the place. The order of the seating quality is

1. Pink (best)
2. Blue
3. Green
4. Orange (worst)

This is definitely something that should be looked at for future world cups and international tests in general.

Kiwis need some bloody better songs to sing at the rugby

A lot of the time during the semi final ther was so much French singing and general noise that it felt like the game was being played in Pais. Basically the fans need to lift our game in the stands when the All Blacks need more support on the field.

Liverpool has “Never Walk Along”. England had “Swing low”. The French have at least two anthems about blood letting that they all know and sing like there is no tomorrow. These songs fill the stadium with noise and must give a hell of a lift to the players on the field. All we have is “All Blacks, clap clap, clap”. It’s depressingly slow even compared to dirges like “Never Walk Alone” and “Swing Low and I don’t imagine it provides much emotional support for the players on the field.”

We have loads of great songs as a nation we just need to choose a few to belt out at the rugby. I have decided on the following criteria:

1. All Kiwis must know all the words – we can work on this
2. It must be easy to sing
3. If must be a song where the tune is mostly held in the words
4. It must be uniquely Kiwi and emotionally motivational

I am open to suggestions.

Russ and I are starting a Facebook group to get some discussion going on this.

Give the Japanese a go

The other Facebook group that we are starting is one backing Japan to host the Rugby World Cup after New Zealand in 2015. They have already hosted a thoroughly successful and much larger football world cup in 2002 and they deserve it. Also I would love to spend 7 weeks in Japan backpacking and getting to know the locals :)

The French have hosted an excellent World Cup

Those of us who have been to all the games agree that the French have thrown the best world cup ever. The stadiums have been sold out even for the games between small teams from far away places. The way the French have throw themselves behind the World Cup and the general atmosphere has been awesome. They even managed to convince the locals not to whistle when opposition goal kickers are taking shots at goal. Add to that the sunny weather in Southern France and the French food, French wine, not to mention the topless beach and it has been a magical few weeks in France.

If the intellectual titans at NZRFU don’t send a delegation to France to look long and hard at how the French organised this world cup then they will have missed a golden opportunity. Mind you these are the same monkeys who when they had a golden opportunity to build a brand new stadium for the World Cup in NZ in 2011 instead managed to secure temporary seating for run down old Eden Park. Not a good omen.

Unanswered questions

1. Why did we lose to a third rate French side away from home? I am still not sure.
2. Why do all the French smoke so much? Don’t they know it is bad for you?

That is all I have to say for now.

South Africa progressed slowly through the knock-out stages to beat the 12th ranked team in the world, Fiji, the 6th ranked team in the world, Argentina and the 7th ranked team in the world, England.

It is a real pity that New Zealand (1st), Australia (2nd) and France (3rd) were all too weak to make the final.

The rankings I am using are the IRB pre tournament rankings.

In the third/fourth place play-off Argentina repeated the victory they had over the French in their pool to show the world it wasn’t a fluke. The Argentinians have surprised a lot of people this tournament and are one of a few teams that have shown real courage and determination. The only other teams I would single out for praise would be England and Tonga who both did much better than expected.

Other teams like Australia, Ireland, Wales and New Zealand go home with nothing but difficult questions.

The joke of the tournament has to be:

Q. What do you call the 7th and 8th place play off at the Rugby World Cup
A. The Bledisloe Cup

After a hugely successful run where he only nearly missed one flight for going to the wrong airport Phil finally missed one of the weekends because he thought “we were leaving on Friday night.”

We did manage to get this photo that was a dead ringer at Disneyland in Paris.

South Africa predictably thrash Argentina. And a gutsy English side beat France. So the team that knocked us out can’t even beat England. Great.

I missed the whole thing at my friends wedding in Mondragon, Spain.

The weekend started as usual with a massive party on the way to the game city. This week it was Cardiff. Cam hired a van that could fit 15 people and had enough room to stand in the back. So stand we did playing old school Kiwis classics and singing at the tops of our lungs. As the driver and the only sober person in the van Cam put up with a lot of shit and never complained. Respect.

The party fizzled out on arrival in preparation for a long day partying on Saturday.

Saturday we got up in the usual manner had a plate of grease each and sewed the flags of the teams we had defeated onto our overalls.

Our venue of choice for the Australia v England quarter final was the mighty Cardiff Walkabout which was full to bursting with Kiwis when we arrived.

The England v Australia game was a great spectacle with England dominating up front and slowly grinding Australia down. My Australian girlfriend was not at all happy that the whole of the Kiwi contingent in the Walkabout loudly supported England. She saw it as an ANZAC betrayal. As I tried to explain to her at the time, New Zealand have good reason to be afraid of Australia and almost none to be afraid of England. Our quarter final was still six hours away and we were swept up in the drunken euphoria of people who thought their place in world cup history had become that much more certain with the departure of our old nemesis Australia. Needless to say, she didn’t understand.

Little did we know that we would suffer the same fate later in the day.

Knocked out by the French – again

There is no denying that Wayne Barnes and the linesmen had a shocker. Not just missing the French forward pass and sending McAlister off, but also in the penalty count in general. Nine penalties to two against you when you do 80% of the attacking just doesn’t make sense. I would love to know what the average number of penalties is per game and how this highly skewed ratio compares to other games. The French also made nearly 200 tackles to our 50. Does this correlate with other games of rugby? Do the defenders under pressure concede more penalties or do the team with all the possession? In the second half we dominated possession and at one stage played 25 consecutive phasesm and still we couldn’t score. The French played with enormous dedication and discipline and the infringements they made were either not noticed or not acted on by the ref. With minutes to go and only 2 points behind the All Blacks were so sure they would get over the line for a try they didn’t take the smart decision to take a drop goal right in front of the French posts. This overconfidence or failure of leadership was the last in a long line of stuff ups that ultimately cost us the game. We were utterly utterly gutted.

We tried to go out for a drink afterwards but no one was in the mood. For once time dragged when we were having rum.

In the aftermath it is disappointing that a small number of Kiwis went overboard with death threats to the ref and other online abuse. It makes us all look bad but hopefully rugby fans from around the world will realise that every country has a few dicks who take it too far to ruin it for everyone.

Another sunny weekend in France. Another easy game of rugby where a minnow gets swept aside. The second highlight of the game were the awesome seats we had. The 35,000 seater Stadium de Toulouse was really intimate and we had an amazing view of the game. The first and most amazing highlight was that Grant was sitting next to a quy who looked a lot like Albert Einstein. Grant who is probably the smartest in our group yelled this out to the rest of us somehow not realising that Albert Einstein was probably called Albert Einstein in France as well.

Russ continued his dominance of the pool we are running for each game. Each game we all put in five euros and try to pic the difference between the scores. Phil was the early leader but now it looks like Russ is in charge. Since running a pool often ends up with some of us loudly supporting the other side we have decided not to have any pools on All Black matches during the knock out stages as it might create bad fan karma.

After the game we watched the Wales v Fiji game in a park beside the river that runs through Toulouse. The locals had set up a huge outdoor screen and bars, bbqs etc and it was a fantastic atmosphere. The game was so good I would recommend it to people who have never watched rugby before to get them into the sport. By the end when Fiji scored the winning try there were hundreds of people on their feet cheering for the gutsy Pacific Islanders. The handful of Welsh present must have felt very alone.

The usual partying ensued for the remainder of the weekend.

This weekend we decided to fly up to Glasgow on Saturday morning and have a night out there and train down to the match in Edinburgh on Sunday morning.

Whilst waiting for our plane at Gatwick we were approached by two security guards who wanted to know why we were wearing orange overalls. They left us alone when we explained that we were idiots from New Zealand who thought it would be fun to dress in bright orange overalls for the entire world cup. Later on we are asked the same question by two police officers armed with machine guns.

The rugby highlight of the weekend was the huge performance minnows Tonga put in against the lacklustre South Africans. Tonga gave the Saffas the shock of a life time and were still in the game at half time. The Saffas brought on all the big guns they were hoping to rest just after the second half and they had an immediate impact. The plucky Tongans never gave up and at the final whistle were just five points short of the greatest rugby upset of all time.

Following the game we toured the city and took in a few of the local bars until 4am. Surprisingly we were only refused entry to one location because of our bright orange overalls. The tour included a stop a Primark where I came up with the idea of a game where we could dress each other in anything we liked for a maximum price of five pounds. I thought this was another brilliant idea of mine until all the rest of the boys headed straight for the women’s department and we all spent the remainder of the afternoon looking like colour blind lunatics from the institute or cross-dressing alcoholics.

The most famous person we ran into this week was Will Mellor from “Two Pints of Larger and a Packet of Crisps”

Sunday morning we took the train to Edinburgh for our biggest match so far. Scotland’s fielded a second string side as they rested their top players for their all important clash with Italy in next weekends final round of the pool competition. The winner of the Scotland/Italy clash will progress to the knock out rounds. The loser will go home in humiliations. Despite racking up 40 points the All Blacks looked rusty with at least two other tries getting dropped and Carter missing half his kicks at goal.

After the game we went to Edinburgh airport for our flight to London. We unexpectedly ran into the All Blacks who we think were flying to Marseilles. I didn’t speak to any of them of course because even though I am 3 years older than the oldest All Black I still feel like an unworthy child around sporting superheroes. It was well cool to see them up close though and the whole airport stopped to stare at them.

Lyon is a beautiful city in southern France with two wide rivers running through it. At nearly 30 degrees centigrade the weather was absolutely spot on for a touch of outdoor beer drinking and talking about rugby.

The game was the walk over everyone thought it would be with the All Blacks scoring 11 tries against Portugal, the 22nd ranked team in the world. The atmosphere in the stadium was awesome at the vocal Portuguese fans cheered all the way up to the final whistle. Later on that night we saw loads of them in local bars and they seemed pretty stoked by the days events despite the claims by some reporters that such obvious mismatches have no place in the world cup.

After the game Phil and I were interview by TVNZ. His overly verbose comments on the match were left on the cutting room floor while my more succinct analysis hit the chord with the reporter and were aired on New Zealand television :)

We were also lucky enough to run into New Zealand’s record break number 10 Andrew Merhtens. He was really friendly and posed for photographs but had to dash off as he was helping TV3 with their television coverage.

Dinner was in a restaurant called carnivores with a couple of Jo’s English friend who live in Lyon. Later that night we ended up in a small bar with a live rock cover band. They were awesome and we moshed so hard most of us would have sore calve muscles well into the following week.

Sunday morning started like a lot of Sunday mornings. Slowly with no loud noises and lots of rehydration.

We walked back to the river to have breakfast on a riverboat only to find the boat closed and a huge farmers market going on. Being the flexible opportunists that we are we bought as much food as out eyes thought we could eat and had a massive picnic by the river.

Later in the day we spent two whole hours renting bikes from the local bike rental scheme. The local government in Lyon have hundreds of computerised cycle racks and thousands of bike spread all over the city. The idea is that anyone can purchase a card from the machine by the bike racks and then swipe the card at any machine and grab a bike. The amount you are charged depends on how long it takes you to get the bike back into another rack. Journeys under thirty minutes are free. We had a few problems using the scheme as it was entirely in French. Also loads of the bikes didn’t work or the machines that isues them didn’t work. There were also long queues so the whole process took us four hours to get four bikes. Once we had the bike we immediately proceeded to push our bikes about a kilometre up the steepest hill in town. As the most vocal advocate of the bike ride and as I had loudly talked up how easy it would be, I copped a lot of flak for getting off my bike 50 meters into the hill climb covered in sweat and ready to collapse. The hard work was worth it to see the beautiful church and for the awesome ride down where I totally made my bike belch thick blue smoke from the breaks.