(I’m pleased to introduce the beginning of a wonderful collaboration between The Outsiders’ Edge and Terry my correspondent on the scene in beautiful Wellington New Zealand. Terry’s article on Wellington is quite beefy. I crack myself up sometimes.)

Oh Wellington is Wonderful

Welcome to the first of my (hopefully) regular columns direct from the city of Wellington.

The first thing a large number of you will be wondering is “where in the world is Wellington”, well  my geographically challenged friends I shall attempt to enlighten you.

I need you all to now go and grab your globes (no not those ones, this is a family show) give them a spin until you find Australia. Locate Sydney then turn right, go down a bit and you should have found New Zealand. Find the bottom of the ever so originally named North Island (hint it’s north of the South Island) and there lies Wellington. If you have ended up in Outer Mongolia or Ohio  then you have bigger issues than a short geography lesson could sort out.

Yes Wellington is in New Zealand, in fact it is the capital of the country. Wellington is home to Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame (no there are no Hobbits walking around Wellington) as well as the fourth best folk duo in New Zealand Brett & Jermaine from Flight of the Conchords.

Noted New Zealand implores you to read this article or he will do another re-make of King Kong.

Wellington most notable features are the hills that it is built upon, the wind and possibly the only naked tramp with his own Wikipedia entry  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hana ). For those of a more sophisticated bent we are the coffee capital of Australasia. However we are not here to discuss the Arts, naked tramps or coffee, we are here instead to talk about sport.

Despite it’s small size (around 382,000 people) Wellington boasts a number of professional and semi professional sports teams in sports as diverse as Rugby, Football (Soccer for the North Americans amongst you), Cricket, Netball (don’t worry I will explain theses sports in a later column) and Basketball.

In the spirit of American talk shows lets have a look at the some serious and not so serious facts about the Wellington professional sporting scene.

1: The Hurricanes Rugby Franchise play in the Super 14 competition, this involves teams from New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Just to confuse you in the future the competition will be known as the Super fifteen with the addition of another team.

www.hurricanes.co.nz

2:  The Wellington Phoenix play in the Australian A League Football competition under special licence from Fifa, this is due to there been no professional league in New Zealand. http://www.wellingtonphoenix.com/

3: The Central Pulse play in a combined Australian & New Zealand netball league. http://www.pulse.org.nz/page/home.aspx

4: The majority of Wellington representative and professional teams wear the cities colours of Yellow and Black. These colours I’m told are very slimming when worn in vertical stripes but this is most likely not the reason they were originally chosen (there is no charge for the fashion advice).

5: Two of the professional Franchise teams, the Wellington Hurricanes (Rugby) and the Phoenix  (Football)  play in the same Stadium. Officially known as Westpac Stadium but unofficially called “The Cake Tin” by rugby supporters (due its supposed resemblance to a cake tin) or the  “Ring Of Fire” by Football supporters. Total crowd capacity is around 40,000 with the installation of temporary seating.

6: One of the Hurricanes current players  Ma’a Nonu is known to wear eye shadow on occasion but at 6 feet tall, 105kg and as hard as nails you don’t want to laugh at him.  Feel free to examine the following if you are not to sure exactly how hard he is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDSt5ks6bkg

7: A former captain of the Hurricanes took it upon himself to discipline a team-mate who was causing trouble during a night out at a bar by hitting him around the head with the nearest object to hand, which unfortunately for both players happened to be a ladies handbag. This of course was all caught on camera and played with great glee on the news channels throughout the land. The handbag was eventually sold for a large amount of money on a local internet auction site.

8: The Hurricanes have never won a Super 14 title and but reached the finals in 2006 eventually losing to the Canterbury Crusaders in a game remembered mostly for the fog that descended onto the pitch reducing visibility to almost nothing.

Bret Mckenzie from Flight of the Conchords has nothing to do with the previousparagrpah, but I thought this would be a good place for his picture

9: The creation of the Wellington Phoenix was a result of probably the most expensive haircut in history (5 million dollars and counting). With the demise of the previous New Zealand Franchise in the Australian A league there was a distinct possibility that professional football would be lost to these shores. That was until local Property Developer Terry  Serepisos sitting in his local barbers having a haircut decided to finance the creation of a Wellington based Football club to give something back to the city he lives in.

10: The unofficial Wellington Phoenix supporters club was set up before the franchise even had a name or any players. This band of merry men (and women) took their name from a particularly nasty  disease and are known as the Yellow Fever .  They are generally acknowledged to be amongst  the best supporters in the A league.

www.yellowfever.co.nz

11:For the more rabid members of the Fever the club has set up their own area of the stadium above the players tunnel known as the “Fever Zone”. From this area on game day can be heard such chants as “Wellington is wonderful”, “stand up for the Phoenix” and of course the ever popular “ the referees a w…..” (I’ll leave the rest of that one to your imagination).

12: It is now traditional for members of the Yellow Fever to remove their shirts during the last 10 minutes of home games if the Phoenix are winning. This is done with no regard to the state of the weather at the time nor to the physical make up of the participants body, this leads to some obviously frightening scenes.

This correspondent has it on good authority that a UN Security council resolution is been proposed that would try to contain this sort of crime.

If you are of a strong disposition view the following clip at the 4:12 mark and prepare to be as stunned (and possibly nauseated) as the commentators were:

13:The Wellington Phoenix have possibly one of the longest away journeys in a domestic Football competition when they play  Perth Glory  in Perth Australia. The total distance the team travels to the match is over 5000 kilometres.

14: The Phoenix have not lost a home game at the Ring of Fire since late 2008.

15: The Central Pulse Netball  team did not win a game for almost 2 seasons. This  dubious honour was finally put behind them when they won a game against the New South Wales swifts in 2009.

16: The average height of the Central Pulse players is 1.80 metres or nearly 5 feet 11 inches.

Well that ends my first column from the land of the long white cloud. Hopefully you now know where Wellington is located (at the very least) and have learnt a little bit about some of the teams that make up the local sporting scene.