Football on the rise for both sexes in NZ

The national game in New Zealand, as you probably know, is rugby. And it's a blokes' game. Or rather it used to be. In fact there are plenty of women throughout the country playing rugby just as fiercely and energetically as their male counterparts.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Saturday morning game one of my grandsons was playing in. His position is hooker, that guy who dangles between two props in the scrum. And this fellow really does dangle because he's small for his age. Some of my friends won't believe this, but I actually played hooker myself way back when I actually played rugby. But unlike my grandson, who's in there boots and all, I wasn't cut out for the game. Half the time the players from the opposite team would wind up covered in blood when we went down in a scrum: my blood, because my nose would bleed at the drop of a hat. Even if my nose hadn't bled, I still preferred indoor sports, with the less physical contact the better.

It was interesting that the visiting team in this particular game had one girl player in it. And she was very good: she had speed, and she was excellent at kicking goals. She could have been easily hurt by some of the bigger boys in either team, but she seemed to manage to keep out of their way - or perhaps they avoided her, because I think even in boys of that age there's an inbuilt sense that girls won't take the impacts a boy might.

Courtesy NZ Football

I said at the beginning that rugby is our national game, but soccer, it appears, is rapidly catching up. And of course there are girls in soccer too, and plenty of them. (The National women's team is called the Football Ferns; the men's is the All Whites, in contrast to the internationally-known men's rugby team, the All Blacks.)

One of my other grandsons used to play in a team when he was younger that had girls as well as boys in it. Now that the boys are bigger I think the sexes are separated off into their own teams. But girls' teams are catching on fast. There was a photo in the sports pages of the newspaper a couple of days ago promoting girls' soccer, in fact.

Which was part of the reason that I decided that the main character in my latest children's fantasy, The Disenchanted Wizard, would be a girl who plays soccer - with a passion. And also idolises Xanadu Whitworth, the top player in the city. At the beginning of the story, Della, the soccer player, is putting up an enormous poster of Xanadu in her bedroom. Her younger cousin Harold thinks Xanadu's smile is probably photoshopped. Della scoffs at the idea, and it turns out, in due course, that she's right to scoff. But she's wrong about some of the other things Harold has to say...

Arts versus Sports

It's annoyed me for years that the Arts in our newspapers get such short shrift compared to Sport. Oh, yes, we have two pages (on the same day, Thursday) each week, given over to the Arts. But wait, Sport not only gets a minimum of three or four pages per day, but a complete and separate section of its own on a Friday. 

Reviews of concerts and theatre events each get a minimum number of words (300) and even some of those may be cut at the sub-editor's discretion, if they get a review at all. And sometimes the reviews are so late that they're no use to someone making up their mind whether to go to a show or not. The Taieri Musical Theatre production of Grease which took place last week from Thursday to Saturday, with four performance in all, got a review, but it didn't appear until Monday this week, after the show had closed. This isn't unusual. 

So I was immensely pleased to see someone else commenting on this issue in today's paper. 

Letter to the Editor in the Otago Daily Times, 28.7.16, page 20.

The ODT (7.7.16) reported in just 87 words the outstanding clean sweep by the New Zealand Youth choir at a recent international competition in Pardubice, Czech Republic. The choir won all four categories and the Grand Prix.

Imagine if this [had] been given an All Blacks’ victory treatment. Front page, with a picture, it would have included: every piece of music the choirs sang, how many points were awarded in each category, the judges’ comments, which choir members had sore throats or mild colds, biographical details of “new caps” in the choir and performance statistics for those who had been in the choir before, comments on their training and preparation, and reactions to the win from singing teachers and choral experts. The conductor would be a household name.

Dreaming, I know, as apparently we are far more interested in reading 500 words on the naming of the Russian Olympic athletic team.

Rosemary McBryde, 

Waitati. 

Stage struck

When I was a young man, I had two very close friends, both of whom left New Zealand for the bright lights of London - with intentions to go on the stage. Neither of them went on the stage; one of them eventually came back home after having an interestingly varied career in the usual sort of jobs NZers do when they go on the Big OE. The other got a lot closer to show business, at one time being part of the film promotion team for MGM. Which meant he got to see all the movies that were worth seeing, often before they went to the English public. I saw Last Tango in Paris in a tiny little private cinema as a result of this (not that I was greatly impressed with it), and also Pinocchio before it came out on a re-release. (Those were the days when you couldn't just go down to your local video store and hire a movie you liked - you had to wait until either the distribution company decided it was time to give it another go (which could be years after its original release) or until you caught it at some niche cinema where they managed to ferret out movies that weren't readily available.) I'm not sure if I saw Pinocchio as a child, but even as an adult it was a revelation in that small cinema; animation like you couldn't believe possible.

This same friend stayed in the UK until he died (much too young); he lived on the fringe of the show business world, flatting with a fellow Dunedinite who'd been big time in amateur theatre here and wound up on a daytime soap there. This actor had a tiny part in A Clockwork Orange, as a policeman. I think he's visible for all of a minute and a half.

I was reminded of this by reading an article in the Guardian today about young actors at the Royal Scottish Academy of Drama and Music in Glasgow, people who are still hopeful of getting in the business even in these tough times. Not that it's ever been easy to be an actor: two-thirds of them may be out of work at any one time, and reality TV certainly hasn't helped.

The curious thing is that when I joined my two friends in London, I hadn't had any plans to go on stage, but I certainly got a lot closer to it than either of them did. I went over to study as a repetiteur at the London Opera Centre, and wasn't only involved in the productions the Centre put on in-house (and the one that was presented at the Sadlers Wells Theatre), but also had free access to opera rehearsals at Covent Garden, which became almost as familiar to us as the Centre. I even played for auditions at the English Opera's theatre once. On the stage (a rather scary moment, actually). And on another occasion I played for a young singer in a competition, Abigail Ryan, at the Wigmore (pictured on right) - and she won. And went off to Germany to study as a result.

Well, that'll do for name-dropping, for the moment. Our mini-dramas at church have finished their 'run' - there were five in all, and I made it into four of them. (The second was on at the same time as When We Are Married.) Last Sunday's featured the four blokes who've appeared in the previous plays, and they were celebrating the loss of the All Blacks at home. One of them, who's become increasingly angry over the last couple of episodes, tries to explain his anger amidst the banter. It was a good little piece, and should have got a number of laughs, but the audience was surprisingly subdued, and it became hard work for the actors to keep up the momentum. Never mind, it made its point, I think. It had a second 'half' as it were: a return to the four soliloquies we'd started the series off with; this time the four actors (three of the guys and one of the two women who'd appeared in the plays) went in reverse order to the first play, and their speeches showed the progress they'd made. Different levels for each, but progress nevertheless.