Peter Jackson column: Let’s ban the booze – at least during the match

Wales opened their wondrous new stadium to a fanfare of fancy features, not least its capacity to pour alcohol in record time – 12 pints every 20 seconds.
Given that its premises included 22 bars, the Millennium Stadium had no problem serving up vast quantities of beer – 77,184 pints during one match alone to a captive adult attendance estimated at 63,000.
Nobody who knows what it’s like to have his or her viewing disrupted by a gurgling stream of spectators bearing cardboard trays of drinks will not be the least bit surprised.
Those figures, reported some years ago on the occasion of a Wales-France match, have a strikingly sober message in the light of last week’s events. Ominously, Wales play France this week. More ominously, it kicks off not on Saturday afternoon but Friday at 8.05pm.
If their experience last week is anything to go by, the British Transport Police will be braced for a hard night, one made all the harder by the danger of too many so-called fans having too much to drink before kick-off.
The Scotland match last week started three hours earlier and still caused all manner of mayhem according to the Transport Police. Chief Inspector Sandra England reportedly called it ‘a cultural disaster’.
She was talking about middle-aged men ‘turning into drunken idiots’.  Superintendent Andrew Morgan identified the same age group.  “Our problem,” he said.  “Is middle-aged men who think they can behave any way they like.
“I would like to film some of these people and when they are back in their three-piece suits on the Monday morning going to work, play it back to them because it’s a disgrace.”
People have been getting drunk before and after rugby internationals for a very long time.  The difference now is that they can also get drunk during the match in Cardiff with the bars reputedly pumping out yards of ale in the time it takes Usain Bolton to run 100 metres.
The vast majority of Welsh fans suffer as a consequence. Understandably, some are becoming increasingly irritated at paying up to £85 to watch the match only to have their vision impaired by a constant flow to and from the bars.
The drunkenness that appalled the Transport Police last week is, regrettably, nothing new.  Rather than risk waiting until it gets worse, the Welsh Rugby Union ought to close the bars at a suitable time before the match starts and reopen them once it finishes.
They should do so to protect the boozing minority from themselves and the sober majority from those who feel in need of constant refueling.  Is it asking too much to expect them to watch the game without a drink in their hand?
Sadly, it is and that is why the WRU ought to act decisively before the trouble escalates. The longer they fail to do so, the more they will expose themselves to speculation that they are putting bar takings above the behaviour of those fans who drink and the well-being of those who do not.
I have seen some of those ‘middle-aged’ fans in action. Some years ago, at half-time during a Wales-Springbok match, one passing along an unprotected side of the Press box, no doubt on his way to the nearest bar, reached out towards a South African colleague’s laptop and tried to put his fist through its screen.
Nobody did anything because that kind of behaviour doesn’t happen at rugby matches, or at least it didn’t until comparatively recently. Had the same thing happened at a soccer stadium, it would have been condemned as another example of football hooliganism.
The WRU have said that the sale of alcohol during games is under ‘regular review’ and that it ‘takes sensible drinking seriously’.  The vast majority take their rugby seriously. All they ask is to be able to watch without the distraction of a conveyor belt of booze sloshing around them from start to finish.
The WRU have a choice, to turn the taps off during matches or cock a deaf ear and carry on regardless, cashing in on those who cannot, it seems, watch Wales play without needing the prop of a pint.