It’s been about four years since I started road tripping down to the Waikato most winter weekends to watch rugby league. It started as an itch I wanted to scratch, to watch a game in my old hometown of Rāhui Pōkeka. But it quickly turned into something else – a love affair.

You can’t get a jaffa soda in a glass bottle at Davies Park anymore. Or anywhere else for that matter. But thanks to some generous, big hearted and dedicated people, you can still go to Davies Park and taste that flavour.

Lots of people think Ministry of Works slacker culture died when the infamous government department was privatised, deunionised, dehumanised and transformed into a model of neoliberal pothole-filling success in 1988. Not so. It lives on in organised cricket.

How do people react when the world is relentlessly beating them down again and again and again and again without any gaps for oxygen?

It had been 14 long years since Tūrangawaewae Rugby League Sports and Cultural Club last defeated Taniwharau - in the 2006 Waikato Rugby League Grand Final.