I went to bed Saturday night wondering if Spark would be offering refunds, and sure enough, woke up Sunday to the news that’s exactly what they’re doing.

And just as well.

What a cluster.

Call me naïve, but I thought given it’s 2019, and given Spark’s hype talk on it, that those of us suckers who bought the rugby would actually get the rugby.

My bad.

Saturday night rolled round and what did we get? Not even buffering.

In fact my husband said at the time, even buffering would be better than this.

What we got was a blank screen with a message from Spark – ‘We are having problems try again later’.

We did. Still nothing.

My husband hit the ‘live chat support line’ for customer support.

Even that was buffering. A message popped up – ‘please wait you’re in a queue to speak to an agent..’

We waited. Nothing.

So I did what all people do in desperate situations. I hit social media.

I uploaded a picture of our blank screen to Instagram. I was blown away by the number of replies and messages from people experiencing exactly the same thing.. a number of people saying they’d given up, a number of people asking about refunds.

I even got offers from people offering to set us up an illegal feed of the game.

Spark, embarrassingly, had to move the game to TVNZ.

And that was only the first AB’s game, that was only 132,000 people streaming or trying to stream.

That’s tiny numbers for an All Black’s game in a World Cup which would usually attract at least half a million viewers..

Which made me think, are people just not bothering?

Or are too many people unable to get this streaming service?

Or, are large numbers of people just way smarter than us and have figured out this would always be the case and they’re just waiting for all the games to crop up on free to air TV?

Disappointingly, Spark tried to play the PR card and minimise the cluster by saying “a small percentage of customers (were) experiencing streaming quality issues.”

Why would you try to make this sound like an itsy bitsy teeny weeny technical hitch?

Why downplay it? Why pretend it was only affecting a handful of people?

We know what’s going on. It’s crap. It doesn’t work. It should never have been allowed to happen.

Rugby is this country’s biggest sport and the AB’s in a World Cup year, should be readily available for everyone to enjoy.

This frantic scrambling of people to buy new TV’s, download new technology, sort apps, buy new routers and modems and WiFi boosters.. it’s bollocks.

Why should everyone have to jump through all these hoops just to end up with buffering blurry and blank screens?

Let’s call it for what it is. A failed experiment and let’s get the whole World Cup free to air from here on.