Manukau Rovers Rugby Football Club

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Rugby World Cup 2011

The Manukau Rovers Rugby Football Club is in a unique location in Auckland with its close proximity toAuckland International Airport.

Rugby World Cup visitors to Auckland should take the opportunity to visit the club that hosted the Welsh team in the inagural World Cup.

Manukau Rovers is one Auckland rugbys oldest clubs having moved to its present location in 1972.

Williams Park is beside the motorway into Auckland from the airport

and we take pride in the facilities we have to offer. Visit and experience the atmosphere of a genuine amateur rugby club and view the memorabilia on display in our famous Dungeon.

The club offers its facilities to visiting teams to play a friendly game of rugby during the World Cup and request all visiting teams to contact us.

We have also discussed the use of our clubrooms for backpackers to use during the World Cup and are requesting backpackers make contact so we can gauge the interest in this project.

Check our contact page the email the club

MANUKAU CLUB SETTING FINE EXAMPLE

If collecting ironic touches in sport happens to be your hobby, then its the Manukau Rovers Rugby Football Club

At a meeting in 1923, Manukau Rovers approved a resolution that it cashes its chips in rugby league and affiliated with the Auckland Rugby Union.
One member, C.J. Williams, asked that his vote against the resolution be recorded. Twenty-nine years later Mick Williams was made a life-member of the rugby union. Five years later, he became its president.

"Mick's is a classic case," says Manukau's Secretary-Manager, Barry Thomas - who with 86 games is remembered as one of Auckland's finest players since the Second World War - "of a working man being honoured in a sport for his sheer hard work for it."

When invited to become the Auckland union president, Mick, always shy and modest, demurred. "Why not?" he was asked. He had a sufficient answer. As a man who had worked most of his life in MacEwan's foundry at Penrose, he travelled everywhere by bike - which is not a good idea on wet winter nights going to meetings.

In amassing heaps of photographs, old-time and modern, for celebrations which will coincide with the second test between France and New Zealand at Eden Park in June, Thomas has uncovered moments of Manukau history as fascinating as Mick Williams' contrary vote.

The club seems to have begun in junior rugby in 1885, seceded league about 1913 when player disenchantment in rugby wasn't much different from attitudes of recent years. The club returned in 1924 to a life that's grown more abundant and fruitful; especially, as to this latte, in serving as an ideal catalyst for the mixture of races which populate Mangere.

One man, Charlie Agnew, almost on his own fought off the crisis which could have led to the club's going into recess for the duration of the Second World War and for this and many other reasons he is remembered as fondly as Mick Williams.

But it was of Mick that the club thought when in 1972 its committee negotiated with Manukau City Council, surely one of the most enlightened of all local bodies in its relation ships with sport, the establishment of what became Williams Park.

For three playing fields and a commodious clubhouse, the club had to put up 25 per cent, it was granted 25 per cent by the council and its repayment of about $100,000 - now down to about $7000 - represented the rent.

Legally, the council and the club entered into a shared responsibility. The clubhouse now is valued at about $500,000. It is home to 700 or 800 members.

It must be the Mangere air or atmosphere which produces enlighten. Well ahead of similar moves by other clubs, Manukau years ago set up its own judicial committee to deal with misbehaviour on or off the playing field.

It would be impossible to measure the importance to urban areas of sporting clubs as well controlled and disciplined as Manukau has been for so many of these last 60 years.

One of the real tributes is surely paid when boys of all ages bound up to Barry Thomas. "Please, sir," they ask. "When can we start playing footy?"