If you’re stuck for something to do next Monday night, you could do worse than to head to Porirua Park for the final of Wellington’s premier one grade schoolboy rugby competition. The match is to be played between Mana College and Wellington College.

As detailed in a story in the Dom Post, Mana has made a dramatic rise through the grades after starting the year in premier two and being promoted mid-season, and to have made it to the final is nigh-on miraculous.

What’s important about this fixture, is that it undermines the traditional hegemony of the private (“privileged”, “monied”) schools in the sport — locally, provincially and even nationally. To illustrate — the other teams in Wellington’s premier one grade are St. Pats Town, St. Pats Stream, Rongotai*, and Hutt Valley High School*. So with only a slightly illogical extrapolation of this situation you can quite easily couch the final in the terms of a good old battle in the war between the classes, a skirmish in the ongoing struggle of the proletariat to free itself from the oppressive domination inflicted upon it by the controllers of the means of production *cough* *splutter*

(* Yes, I know Wellington College is ostensibly a public school, as are Rongotai and HVHS, stop trying to distract me).

So what could you expect? A huge turnout from the locals to support the Mana College team; and a reasonable-sized crew of rowdy Wellington Coll boys generally acting like clowns, and performing the school haka at the slightest opportunity, over and over.

It should be a really great match, anyhow.

MANA COLLEGE v. WELLINGTON COLLEGE
6PM, MONDAY 13 AUGUST, 2007
PORIRUA PARK