Trevor Mallard’s Last Stand
18th November 2006


The home of Welsh rugby, the National Stadium, dominates the centre of Cardiff. The castle and surrounding buildings are dwarfed by massive pylons supporting a retractable roof.

At ground level the stadium is masked by a maze of narrow streets, tightly packed with shops, pubs and business houses. Rounding a corner of a street the first view of this vast sports ground is unnerving. It rears above the city like a beached supertanker - concrete and cavernous. Circumnavigate the building and all you see is a vast circular backside. The eyes, heart and intent are turned inward, focussed on the hallowed turf.

But this concrete tenant, this idle giant reclining across the breast of the city, is a source of immense pride to the Welsh, and on match days it opens like a flower, resplendent with colour and excitement. My experience of a rugby test in Cardiff remains one of the most pleasurable sporting memories of my life.

I don’t know the story of how Wales transformed Cardiff Arms Park into the shining National Stadium but I’m sure it attracted controversy. Obviously at some point they rose above the rhetoric and set to building the thing.

I hope the same will happen with the proposed waterfront stadium that has kept our media solvent this week, though I think the government couldn’t have got off to a worse start.

Their first mistake was to appoint Trevor Mallard as the minister responsible. It’s a clear signal that the government, beaten all around the park this year over election funding and Taito Philip Field, has lost its nerve. Trevor Mallard is a brawler and to make him the man to sell the stadium is saying that the government anticipates a battle.

Labour could argue with justification that in the current political climate any decision it makes will be mined for controversy by the media and for political advantage by the opposition, which is exactly what has happened. Commentators and journalists have fastened gleefully upon the negative story while politicians have approached it as another round of point-scoring.

Mallard has been woeful, as shifty and defensive as a cream bun in a factory canteen. Instead of talking up the new stadium he allowed himself to be drawn into discussing piling and access problems as obstacles to developing Eden Park, arguments that sounded as implausible as they were later revealed to be.

The architects for the waterfront stadium fared no better. Having released images of the project that presented it in the worst possible light their spokesperson, challenged by a journalist on National Radio that the stadium would be inward-looking and therefore unattractive, felt compelled to sell it as a sort of colourful Saturday flea market.

Clearly the government’s consultation has been selective at the very least. The thing that surprises me however is how badly Labour has sold this story. This is a government famous for its discipline in promoting policy and for having all its spokespeople and supporters reading from the same script.

If Trevor Mallard can’t simply say why the government has chosen the waterfront option I’ll say it for him.

First, we can afford it. Having been basted for years as being tight-fisted Labour can answer its critics by loosening the purse strings and splashing out. Second, the stadium is a feel-good project, a symbol of national pride and prosperity. It demonstrates, like the America’s Cup, that we can punch above our weight. Third, as the focus of the 2011 Rugby World Cup it will be, for a short but invaluable period, a showcase to the world. We may not be big enough to host the Olympics but we can show ourselves off on a smaller stage with equal razzamatazz.

The third reason is the clincher for the stadium to be built on the Auckland waterfront and not at Eden Park. In our urbanised digital age the great images are all downtown. Think of Sydney 2000, New York on 11th September, the Berlin wall, Gaza, Baghdad. International television audiences are not drawn to aerial images of suburbia. A stadium at Eden Park might as well be in Hororata or Lumsden.

There is one other option for a stadium that as far as I know has not yet been considered but which might be a nifty way through the debate. I was reading recently that Maersk, the shipping company, has launched a fleet of giant supercarriers that are, get this, as big as THREE FOOTBALL FIELDS. Now, if I was Trevor I’d be on the phone to Mr Maersk to charter one of these behemoths, tie it up to the Auckland waterfront at the end of 2010 and stick a pair of goal posts on it. Plenty of room for hot dog vendors and a big grandstand at one end.

They could call it the Mallard stand. Or perhaps Mallard’s last stand.