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More than 120 senior players from around Auckland will take to the fields at Whangateau Reserve this Saturday, September 7, when the Rodney Rams host the final regional Rugby League Masters tournament of the season.
Eight teams of players aged from 35 right up to 80-plus will be playing in four matches, with kick-off scheduled for 2pm.
The Rodney Rams Masters team includes members who live as far north as Whangarei and as far south as Hamilton, as well as Mangawhai, Warkworth, Matakana, Snells Beach and Algies Bay more locally.
They are part of the Auckland Rugby League Masters social competition that has 29 teams split into four modules.
The Rams’ module has eight teams that play at least once every three weeks from April until September under Masters of Rugby League rules, which categorise players by using different colour shorts for each age bracket – those aged 35 to 39 wear white, 40 to 49 black, 50 to 59 red, and 60 years-plus gold with tags.
Rams team manager Sonny Teio said the final tournament was guaranteed to be great fun, with plenty of laughs on and off the field.
“It will be great day out with rugby league coming to our area for the biggest event of the year for this code,” he said.
“We have one player in our module in his eighties and he has played every game all year.”
Teio added that it would likely not just be male players on the field, as this season all modules had been encouraged to allow women aged 30-plus to take part.
The Rams put this into practice at their last game, when they fielded two women players at the annual Ray Inksersole Memorial Match against Hibiscus Coast Raiders at Stanmore Bay Park, on August 18.
The trophy match was devised following the death of Rams stalwart Inkersole, who died in 2017 at the age of 81. He had been co-founder of the Rodney Rams in 1993 and was chairman in 1995 when the club joined forces with the Raiders, as neither club had enough members at the time, and played as the Ram Raiders for two years.
Inkersole was also club president for several years, donated a new deck to the clubrooms when the old building burnt down in 2014, and ran regular fundraising raffles for the Rams.
The Raiders were the trophy holders last year, but the Rams were clinical in punishing players’ errors on August 18 and took the trophy back to Whangateau with a decisive win.
As well as the Raiders, the Rams will be joined for the final tournament on Saturday by the East Coast Bay Barracudas, Glenfield Greyhounds, Glenora Bears, New Lynn Stags, Northcote Tigers and Waitemata Seagulls.
Each game will have two 25-minute halves and be hotly contested, though the results don’t matter as much as the taking part, according to Teio.
“The final score always ends in a draw, because we are all winners to stay active in the greatest game of all – rugby league,” he said.
