Today, the New Zealand Rugby League team play Tonga at Mount Smart Stadium. This is the final warm-up game for the Rugby League World Cup which starts next week. My very good friend Sam Walsh has secured passes for the Mad Butcher’s lounge at the stadium for both me and my father-in-law, Hywel.

The Mad Butcher is a nationwide chain of butcher’s shops established by Kiwi Icon Peter Leitch aka The Mad Butcher. Peter is a cross between Clive Rowlands (i.e. ace raconteur and successful manager of the Kiwi Rugby team in 2006), Bernard Manning (i.e. rude sense of humour) and Sir Alan Sugar (i.e. successful businessman, TV personality and plain speaker).

Anyway, we make our way to the lounge and before the match starts Sam introduces my father-in-law and I to the Mad Butcher. The conversation goes something like this:

Sam: Hi Peter, can I introduce you to my friends from Wales Johnny and his father-in-law, Hywel.

Mad Butcher:  (leaning forward shaking my hand vigorously) Good to meet you mate!

Mad Butcher: (turns to Hywel and shakes his hand equally vigorously) Bloody hell, you’re an old bugger aren’t you, and this is your son-in-law is it ? You know what that means don’t you ?

Hywel: (looking quizzical)

Mad Butcher: (still shaking Hywel’s hand vigorously) He’s shagging your daughter.

Hywel: (long pause) I haven’t thought of it like that.

Sam and his mate Millen are in stitches. I want the floor to swallow me up.

This was the prelude to an afternoon of fun in the Mad Butcher’s lounge perhaps the highlight of which was the introduction by the Mad Butcher over the PA system of Hywel to the two hundred people in the lounge as “my good friend Hywel who’s travelled all the way from Wales to watch this game, silly bastard” before inviting him up to sing the Welsh National Anthem during half time. Fortunately he’s a good singer and carried it off with aplomb.

Having been introduced to the room in this manner, Hywel acquired minor celebrity status with a number of NZ Rugby League ‘greats’ introducing themselves to him and recounting gnarly matches against the Wales Rugby League team  that they’d been involved in.

It was an afternoon that could not have been scripted and for which this blog post cannot  do justice; you had to be there to fully appreciate it. Many thanks to Sam for inviting us as his guests and many thanks to Peter for being Peter!

Tonga lost by 56-8 in what was a side show to the events in the Mad Butcher’s lounge.