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