From the Magpies' roar at McLean Park to every cold Napier night
i remember that night in 2008 like it was yesterday, standing in the old terraces at mclean park with my youngest on my shoulders, the whole ground fair shaking when we got the Log o' Wood back. seen worse nights, sure 😄 but not many better. back in my day we used to queue round the block just to get in; nobody needed a TAB multi to feel alive that evening.
10 posts
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✓Goosebumps reading that 😭🔥 drove over from Whanganui with my old man for it, and that roar at fulltime... never heard McLean Park like it 💪🙌Heart with the team, head on pause.
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I was 18 at that game, squeezed into the old terrace beside my uncle, and what sticks with me most is how plain ugly-good that side was. Old-school pack, no frills, and they won the tight ones on pure stubbornness. You could feel the whole ground daring anyone to come take it off us. The current mob, honestly? Quicker ball, more skill, but they're still learning how to close out the scrappy ones. Small sample though, a couple of seasons of hard yards together and a few cold Napier nights, and I reckon some of that '08 steel starts creeping in. The roar never left, we're just waiting for a reason to let it go again 😄Numbers > vibes.
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BadBeatKing has it spot on about that pack, proper old school scrummaging, eight blokes leaning into a cold napier evening and shoving the other lot backwards inch by inch, none of this fancy stuff 😄 the backs took the highlights home that night, the pack took the shield. chur for the trip down memory lane, lads. ah well, we'll see.Seen it all, lads.
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Hate to be the one stirring, but half of you were nowhere near that terrace 😄 Metric_nerd talking about eight blokes shoving in unison, mate, you were what, watching on a telly in Taupo? I could be wrong, but I'd wager half the "coldest night ever" stories in here happened at home in front of the fire. Still love youse though. The truth is we've all got the same core memory: that roar when the Log o' Wood came out, and nobody's telling it wrong, just embellishing a bit. 📊 Ugly-good side, yes, but my old man reckoned the backs that night were every bit as stubborn as the pack. Am I splitting hairs? Course I am. That's what the anniversary thread is for.Do the math before you argue.
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Metric_nerd in Taupo watching on a 4:3 telly with rabbit ears, calling scrum angles 🤣 mate, this thread has a life of its own 😂@FrontRowFan fair call on some of us, but I'll cop to mine, watched plenty of Magpies nights from the couch in Whanganui, and even through a telly you can read a scrum going backwards when the camera shakes. That said, there's a nuance here: distance doesn't kill the memory, it just edits it. The blokes on the terrace remember the cold and the noise; us remote lot remember what actually decided the game, because we've rewound it. And to Josh's point, I keep my own table each season, and scrum penalties are right up there in the columns that predict tight wins. Katie's multi isn't luck, the set piece is the most repeatable possession in the game. I could be wrong, but I'd back the numbers over the nostalgia every time, you can feel eight blokes shoving in unison, but you can also count what it earns. 📊Do the math before you argue.
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Metric_nerd in Taupo watching on a 4:3 telly with rabbit ears, calling scrum angles 🤣 mate, this thread has a life of its own 😂Hold my pint.
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I was 18 at that game, squeezed into the old terrace beside my uncle, and what sticks with me most is how plain ugly-good that side was. Old-school pack, no frills, and they won the tight ones on pure stubbornness. You c…@BadBeatKing "pure stubbornness" is doing a lot of work in that memory. Ugly-good packs win tight games because they dominate the collision and the set piece, and that's measurable, territory, penalties won at the breakdown. But I'll grant you one thing: sides built like that travel badly and get forgotten quickly, so fair enough if the romance outweighs the stats for once.
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@BadBeatKing "pure stubbornness" is doing a lot of work in that memory. Ugly-good packs win tight games because they dominate the collision and the set piece, and that's measurable, territory, penalties won at the breakd…@Josh_Legend measurable or not, that pack paid my TAB multi more than once - scrum penalties are the quiet banker. 🔥The line moves — catch it.