‘It saved the Crusaders’: The oral history of Christchurch’s long-time temporary stadium

Saturday, 18 April 2026

On Saturday night, the final major sporting fixture will be held at Christchurch’s AMI/Orangetheory/Apollo Projects stadium. Ahead of the match (Wellington Phoenix vs Western Sydney Wanderers FC), MICHAEL WRIGHT talks to the players, managers, builders and board members who built a stadium in 100 days and kept it going for 14 years. The interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

The story begins on February 22, 2011. Former Crusaders and Canterbury Rugby chief executive Hamish Riach was in a salary cap audit meeting when the earthquake struck.

Riach: I ended up under the desk with the auditor. Paper and stuff everywhere, of course. We got everybody out and we were all sort of standing in the car park, all shaken. Then I realised that we had the Ranfurly Shield in the office because Canterbury had the Ranfurly Shield at the time. And I thought to myself I’m not gonna be the one who sees the end of the Ranfurly Shield, so I raced back in and grabbed it.

Ryan Crotty (156-game Crusader, 2009-24): I was in the showers at Rugby Park actually with Dan Carter and a couple of others. It just started rocking and I remember we absolutely bolted out to the field. We were getting smacked from wall to wall. We got out to the middle of the field in our towels and we were like, ‘Crikey, what’s going on?’

Riach: Very quickly we turned our minds to: How are we going to host games of Super Rugby?

Crotty: Jade Stadium wasn’t fit for purpose, so it was all hands on deck. On the bird up to Nelson every week.

Riach: The support we had from our friends at the Tasman Rugby Union in Nelson and the South Canterbury Rugby Union in Timaru was extraordinary. They moved mountains to keep our season alive. From memory, we hosted three games in Nelson and two in Timaru that season. As was Napier. We took a home game against the Chiefs to Napier and the support was just marvellous.

By August 2011, it was clear AMI Stadium (Lancaster Park) was not going to be available for the 2012 season. A new, temporary home in Christchurch was needed. In November, Prime Minister John Key announced the Government would underwrite a $20 million overhaul of Rugby League Park in Addington, in time for the 2012 Super Rugby season. Time was tight.

Riach: Shout-out to Canterbury Rugby League. The very first thing that had to happen was that they had to relinquish their lease with the city council. I’m eternally grateful to the league community, who saw a much bigger picture.

Paul O’Connor (Hawkins Construction site manager): We were selected as the main contractor on December 22. We were actually at our Christmas party. I got a phone call from the project manager and was basically told to stop drinking and start planning.

Tim Kennedy (Aotea Electric manager): We knew from day dot if we weren’t all pulling in the same direction it was never going to work. Paul kind of rallied us and made sure that we got that message across to our teams very strongly.

O’Connor: Everybody understood that there was no missing the date (March 24, Crusaders v Cheetahs). That’s where the whole ethos of the job came from. If you didn’t think you could do it, then go away and we’ll find someone who can. There was a lot of buy-in. We estimated how many operatives we would need and probably got close to a third more than that.

Kennedy: We probably had 90 people on site per day at its peak.

O’Connor: I don’t think I had a day off. Sometimes I’d just go and sleep in my ute for a couple of hours during the day. But there was a hell of an energy. I was tired, I think everybody was, but it didn’t feel like that.

Kennedy: We talk about doing design-build jobs now. This was more like a build-design contract. We had engineers there every day and we were going, ’Look, you’ve drawn this, this ain’t going to work, but this is what we need to do in order to keep progressing’. Everything was just make it up as you go and find the best solution and get it done.

O’Connor: The fitout came from all over the place. Some of the scaffold seats came from the Delhi Commonwealth Games. All those fixtures and fittings, the Vbase people went into Lancaster Park and dragged them all out of there.

Caroline Harvie-Teare (Vbase/Venues Ōtautahi manager, 2007-2011; chief executive 2020-present): A lot of items were repurposed from Lancaster Park. The furniture in the suites, the food and beverage units, the big screen that was purchased for the Rugby World Cup, the turf, the goalposts. The lights came from Carisbrook.

Kennedy: We had our team in Dunedin disassemble the lights, ship them up here and then they actually came up here and put them back together.

O’Connor: A month out, we’re going, ‘Right, what are the things we think we won’t get done?’ So, we had a list, and then we would go to Vbase, and they would say, ’Well no, that needs to be done. I can live without that, but I can’t live without that.’ We had no canopies over the food and beverage. Vbase said if people want beer and a hot dog, they’ll go out and buy it. Which is true.

Harvie-Teare: There wouldn’t be another stadium around that doesn’t have a main commercial kitchen.

O’Connor: The Crusaders were wandering around the site, cooking barbecues, saying hello to the team. Israel Dagg was down there most days.

Crotty: Those guys did such a good job getting it ready to go. There was a lot of work going into it. The boys were pretty excited to see something coming together here in Christchurch.

Riach: We knew we had one home game in 2012 that we had to take elsewhere. It was against the Chiefs in Napier. Things had…moved on. The support and the goodwill from 2011 wasn’t quite there in 2012. We knew we were away from home. They tipped us up in that game and I remember Reado [Crusaders captain, Kieran Read] saying to me afterwards, ‘Hamish, we need to be home. This is done. We need to get home’. I said, ‘I know’.

Crotty: I remember that game. It was just like we’d done it enough. Everyone was ready to get back home, get in front of our people.

Kennedy: The final week was just organised chaos. There were obstacles galore to overcome. We had people wheeling in ovens and fridges and they’re like, ‘Oh can we plug these in?’ and I’m like, ‘Mate, plug everything in. We need to know that this thing’s going to hold together.’

O’Connor: We had to work out a way to fix all the scaffolds together. We initially thought they would bolt, but there was a miscommunication. It was a Friday, so probably a week and a day out. I started ringing every welder I knew and said, ‘Get down here’. There was a lot of swearing because if you’ve got 20 welders working in an area and one guy arcs and he’s not earthed properly, everybody gets a shock. There were some terse words but it was done.

Kennedy: That first game, we literally had generators sitting there because Orion wasn’t sure that the power grid was going to hold up. You know how they call it squeaky-bum time?

O’Connor: You’re waiting for someone to come up and say, ‘All the toilets are blocked’. But once you’ve done your best, your nerves are not gonna help you.

Riach: The opening game against the Cheetahs ‒ man, that was an emotional event. It was a beautiful day. I just remember this sea of flags on a sunny, early evening. All the work had paid off.

Crotty: I actually can’t remember that game. I don’t even know if I played [he did]. I just remember the excitement.

O’Connor: You couldn’t have asked for a better night. We had several beers. It was a couple of days of celebration, to be fair.

The buzz did not last forever. A charitable trust was formed to manage the stadium, which was expected to operate for five years. But soon after the opening, it was clear Addington was going to be the Crusaders’ home for much longer. Earthquake-ravaged Christchurch had a functioning, albeit rudimentary, stadium. Political appetite to build a permanent one was low.

Riach: We paid the same rent for Addington as we paid at Lancaster Park, which had the capacity and all the facilities of an international-quality stadium. We thought we could make it work for five years.

Trevor Thornton (Christchurch Stadium Trust trustee 2012-19; chair 2019-21): There was limited activity on a new stadium. The stands had been leased for three years from the company that put them up, and it became obvious that the new arena wasn’t going to be around in three years. We had a purchase clause in the lease agreement and we were able to acquire the stands for $2 million. Which we didn’t have. So we went to the Christchurch City Council, who agreed to lend us the money on the basis that they might not get it back.

Harvie-Teare: The maintenance costs definitely increased over time. We had an end-of-life assessment done on everything. Some things failed earlier than expected, some things haven’t failed at all.

Thornton: The insurance bill in the first year was half a million dollars. We couldn’t get insurance other than at Lloyd’s of London. The trust agreed we shouldn’t compromise the city further and so we had to fund that. It didn’t continue at that level forever.

Riach: The changing rooms were…not equal. The home team had more space. The visiting teams were in a pretty minimal changing room. It was cramped. Not an ideal way to psych yourself up for a big game of footy.

Harvie-Teare: The changing rooms flood if it rains.

Riach: It posed issues. Curtain-raiser teams didn’t have anywhere to change at all so they had to go over to Horncastle [now Wolfbrook] Arena and then walk across the car park.

Crotty: It became a place the opposition just despised coming to. Especially play-off time. Start of winter ‒ it’s cold, it’s wet. It was a pretty happy hunting ground for us.

While the Crusaders were the ground’s main tenant, Apollo Projects Stadium was also the major outdoor event venue in post-quake Christchurch. Despite its shortcomings, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Foo Fighters (twice), Phil Collins, Snoop Dogg and Ed Sheeran all played Addington. But it was never ideal.

Harvie-Teare: At the end of the day, promoters want to sell tickets. We can do 27,000, 28,000 which is pretty good. If you can sell out at 28 and do two concerts you’re still able to compete. But it’s a bit of a compromised experience. You’ve got sightline issues with all the poles and you don’t have facilities really to host a promoter. The artists are in the changing sheds. With Elton John and some others we hosted them over at [Wolfbrook] arena and transported them over.

Riach: The stadium replacement was a council project. Very early on you could see that it was going to go longer than five years. We knew a new stadium might take two or three years to build, so you had to have decisions on the future stadium probably in 2014. And in 2014 there was absolutely no clarity on what council wanted to do or when they were going to commit.

Crotty: It seemed like it wasn’t going to happen for a while there. But it was our home. We made it what it was.

Thornton: The stadium was clearly going to be required longer than the resources that the trust had. We talked to the Christchurch City Council about them taking it over because with the delay, we would run out of money.

Riach: By 2016, when we were coming towards the end of the first five-year period and there had still been no commitment to a build, we started to get more frustrated for sure.

The stadium trust wound up in 2021. The $2m from council to pay for the seating was repaid, plus another $250,000. By then, Crown funding for a new stadium had been secured. Council backing followed soon after. The new arena, Te Kaha, would be built by 2026. Christchurch’s temporary stadium finally had an end date.

Crotty: I thought I’d get the opportunity to play in a new stadium [Crotty’s last season was 2024; he is now a Crusaders assistant coach]. I certainly didn’t think it’d take as long as it did. But I was pretty happy seeing it out. I have plenty of fond memories of that stadium.

Riach: I will nearly miss it. I’ll miss the idea of it because it causes you to reminisce. But the stadium itself, its time had come.

Kennedy: We had a reunion of all the tradies a couple of weeks back for the last Crusaders game against the Drua. At half-time they got us to go out and do a lap of honour. It was incredible. The crowd gave us a proper standing ovation.

O’Connor: That was extremely humbling. The dear old stadium, ugly as she was, meant a hell of a lot to those people as well.

Kennedy: There were grown men in tears on that field.

O’Connor: You don’t usually have reunions for work. You don’t. We talk about it in the building industry all the time. There are a lot of guys that I’ve worked with over the years since that job that say, ‘Oh, what a great job that was’.

Thornton: We were able to allow an iconic part of Christchurch, the Crusaders, to function because for a year they were on the road.

Riach: Addington simply saved the Crusaders. We couldn’t have survived without it.