Scarlet Sahara

I was confined to barracks on Saturday afternoon as Pontypool did not have a fixture. I hunkered down on the couch and watched two matches on the TV. In fact they were two pretty good matches: Scarlets v Munster and Bath v Northampton. There was not a lot to choose between the quality of rugby and the intensity of play with both matches going right down to the wire. The big contrast, however, was in the atmosphere in the grounds. The Rec was full to bursting while Parc Y Scarlets had vast expanses of empty seats. The official attendance figure at Llanelli was over 6000 but it was hard to believe that this was the case from the pictures on the TV. When the home side really needed the crowd to get behind them as they struggled to withstand a late Munster onslaught the response seemed pretty muted and confined to booing the referee.

How come they seem to be able to fill the grounds in England and Ireland while in Wales the support is so half-hearted? I sat next to a Bath supporter on the plane back from Scotland and he told me that they get 5000+ watching the Bath second team’s home games. We are a million miles away from this in Wales which is much touted as a rugby country. There surely must be some lessons in marketing that we can learn from our English counterparts.

When I reflect on it, I suppose the four professional teams have become glorified city/town teams based in large centres of population and if you went back to the great days of Welsh club rugby these were the kind of crowds that Cardiff, Swansea. Newport and Llanelli used to get. So why would you expect more people to come? Perhaps the strategists thought that by downgrading the resources of the other rugby clubs the fans would gravitate to their regional centre to watch higher quality rugby. This clearly hasn’t happened and the total numbers watching rugby must have plummeted alarmingly.

“But we still get a huge crowd watching Wales at the Millennium Stadium,” I hear you say. Well it seems to a large proportion of the crowd that watching an international match is like going to a night club. The WRU have certainly reinforced this idea by playing excessively loud music and using flashing lights as well as selling alcohol all through the match. I know a lot of dyed-in-the-wool rugby supporters who have stopped going to matches as they can’t stand the constant stream of revellers going back and forth to the bar and toilet. I can understand where they are coming from.

I am sounding like a grumpy old man this morning so I’d better stop but I do care about Welsh rugby. Too many potential fans “don’t give a damn” and if we are not careful Welsh rugby will be “gone with the wind”.

I wish I had the answers.