Silence the razzmatazz, best tunes are on field

When the new All Black captain Sam Cane and his fellow Chiefs reached halftime during last week’s painful Super Rugby Aotearoa defeat by the Hurricanes in Hamilton, they were serenaded down the tunnel by a blast of Don’t Stop Me Now, a song recorded, to the best of your columnist’s limited knowledge of glam rock, by Queen.

- CHRIS HEWETT

The choice of tune seemed just a little odd, for there had been precious little evidence in the first 40 minutes that Cane and company had actually started. Freddie Mercury’s lyrics were almost as irrelevant to the 20-3 deficit as his range of sequin-studded jockstraps, although the home side could certainly have used some of his energy.

All of which begged an important question about rugby’s love affair with “event packaging”– not just the prematch and post-match brands, but also the during-match variety. Namely: What is it for? Or to put the same query in a different way: Why bother?

Leaving aside Gloucester and Northampton, two well-supported clubs with a deep-grained suspicion of “entertainment add-ons”, it is difficult to think of a Premiership venue where the crowd is considered capable of lasting longer than 30 seconds without some form of non-rugby sensory sustenance.

Even in quietly prosperous Bath, where a Liberal Democrat fondue party is viewed as dangerously radical, the resident genius in the marketing department decided that the Recreation Ground atmosphere needed zapping up. Long gone are the polite, precisely articulated tones of Alastair Steel, an affable soul whose years on public address duty were notable for two things: the clarity of his team information and the complete absence of spluttering “come on you Bath” inanities.