This is how you run a rugby tournament: A fan's experience of the Hong Kong Sevens

The Hong Kong leg of the IRB Sevens leaves New Zealand in the dust in terms of stadium experience, writes Jamie Wall.

Attention Lions fans: we welcome you here to Aotearoa next month. Please enjoy our hospitality, tourist destinations and unrelenting reminders of how good the All Blacks are.

Sadly, our stadium experience may leave many of you disappointed. Attending the Hong Kong Sevens – a different, more debaucherous beast than a Lions tour, to be sure – has reaffirmed my view that Kiwi rugby grounds are soulless boxes that have had all the fun stolen from them.

As All Blacks fans, my mate and I were fashionably late to the Hong Kong Sevens, but only by about 20 years. The golden age of Kiwi dominance in the shortened form of the game is now over. Our mid-90s heydey, when the likes of Jonah Lomu and Christian Cullen regularly featured in classic matches against the other Sevens powerhouse, Fiji, a distant memory.

The good news was that in terms of atmosphere, the tournament with the longest and most prestigious history in Sevens hasn’t lost a step.

The stadium is situated up against a uniquely local backdrop of lush green hillsides dotted with 50-storey apartment blocks. It is also surrounded by many, many scalpers. You can’t go twenty paces along the surrounding streets without hearing "Tickeeeets! Buying or selling tickeeets mate?"

For some reason, it’s a profession solely undertaken by Ben Sherman-clad young men from the East End of London. Hong Kong seems a long way to go for a career yelling at people on their way to a stadium to buy something they presumably already have, but fair enough.

After a couple of conversations about how business was going, it seemed like what they were charging wasn’t all that unreasonable either. This all led to a perplexing and as yet unresolved conversation about black market economics. You’re not going to get that in New Zealand, although you may have some luck paying up to 10 times the face value for a ticket on local site TradeMe.

Our costume choice of customised tuxedo jackets, while looking incredibly smart, were not the best for combatting the local heat. We’d walked 40 minutes from our AirBnB to take in a few of the sights, sounds and overpowering smells of Hong Kong, so by the time we got into the ground we were parched. We bought a two-litre jug of cold beer and stood in the shade of the east stand.

That’s right, a jug of beer. And you can get the same quantity of rum and coke, vodka Red Bull or Bloody Marys. You won’t get anything even approaching that size at Eden Park, where three matches of the tour are taking place. However, British fans may be happy to learn that the overpriced beer in piddly plastic bottles will no doubt be nice and warm.

Before long we dared venture into the infamous South Stand. (It seems to be illegal to use ‘South Stand’ without the prefix ‘infamous’). As the concourse around the back of the stand seemed to get narrower, a funnel of perspiration hung heavy in the air. The costumes and hearty drinking that the Sevens is famous for were all on display, all in an R18 area where no pearl-clutching parents could get offended.

This is where the Hong Kong Sevens got its reputation from. Every sticky step brought us closer to a bevvy of booze-glazed torsos, clad in the remnants of whatever fancy dress had survived the drunken hours leading up to then. The majority of the fans seemed to be young Brits, most likely the sons and daughters of the people that will be following the Lions. If that’s the case, the future of British sports drunkenness is in good hands.

The South Stand is so popular it had been full since 7am that morning (two hours before any rugby was going to be played). The queues to get into the stand snaked all the way back to the halfway line. Those who made it through a day in there came out considerably worse for wear. Pity the poor people who had to clean up afterwards.

I suppose it’s only fair to mention the actual rugby that was being played while all this was going on. The All Blacks Sevens were again disappointing. We were, however, treated to American Perry Baker’s game-changing speed, a healthy diet of German rugby (they seemed to be playing every time we looked up) and a predictable Fijian tournament victory.

If you were there too, and you’re coming down to New Zealand for the Lions tour, don’t expect anything like that. The sad thing is, we used to have a Sevens tournament that could rival Hong Kong, but it was killed off by rule-makers and poor forward thinking by the organisers.

When the All Blacks take the field, the entertainment will be entirely confined to the field of play. Which is a shame, but that’s the way we do it down here.