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