Opinion - The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. That was evident last night as while the All Blacks cruised to an all time high score in a punishing Bledisloe Cup performance against the Wallabies, they did so in front of a not even half-full Eden Park, which now means you need to go way back to before the World Cup to find a game when they filled a stadium in New Zealand.
The All Blacks cruised to victory in front of a not even half-full Eden Park. Photo: Photosport
First thing's first, the game itself was a massive improvement on the spluttering showing by both sides the week before, ironically in front of a much bigger crowd.
The Wallabies certainly looked capable of creating an upset win before literally throwing the game away and letting the All Blacks cut loose, scoring eight tries in the process.
But anyone who took even a casual glance at recent Bledisloe series would have seen that the second test has been horrific for the Wallabies over the last decade. In that time the All Blacks have won 10 in a row with an average score of 38-13, with last night being the third time they've cracked a half century.
But that should have been a reason why more people should have been at Eden Park last night, not less.
To be fair to the ones that did show up, the atmosphere was actually pretty decent considering the ground announcer was playing music that wasn't 40 years old for a change, but still the sight of so many empty seats while the haka was being performed was jarring.
The official crowd number was given as a shade over 25,000, which again seemed pretty dubious to the media in attendance, but even then that's still the smallest crowd for a Bledisloe Cup test since 1958, when the fixture was played at the Epsom Showgrounds while the northern grandstand at Eden Park was being built.
The official line from NZ Rugby was that the reason for the low turnout was due to the Covid situation and only having a week and a half to market it, but that doesn't stack up.
A then-underperforming Blues team managed to fill Eden Park just after the first lockdown finished, mainly because they saw the symbolic importance of doing so and pulled out all the stops to make it happen.
The meat-headed decision by some artless jobsworth at NZR to simply cut and paste last weekend's game to this one, complete with $80 to $220 ticket prices and at the child-unfriendly time of 7:05pm, is where the issue lies.
But then again, this is an organisation that honestly believed that signing a deal with an oil company attempting to greenwash its image wouldn't cause any problems, or that no one would spot the hilariously obvious double standard when they boasted of wearing new supposedly eco-friendly jerseys.
The All Blacks themselves made no effort during the week to help promote the test, only giving their usual perfunctory media spots (in fact, the only real intrigue created during the last week was by a beat up on a radio interview quote by Wallaby wing Andrew Kellaway).
This stood in stark contrast to the recent gold medal winning Black Ferns Sevens side. The enthusiasm and willingness to be good talent not only netted the women a huge amount of social media clout in the wake of their Olympic triumph, but also a spot on American TV when their victory haka was appreciated by Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart.
After the game Ian Foster did address the lacklustre turnout, saying that "we live in interesting times" and that the crowd issue "isn't really my problem".
He's definitely right in one sense, as that All Black performance he prepared certainly deserved a bigger crowd than saw it live and did a lot to help cement his job through to the next World Cup nonetheless. But at the same time he should find it pretty problematic that his bosses have no intention of engaging with the people who are expected to pay to watch his product.