{"id":395317,"date":"2026-04-24T11:14:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T11:14:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/395317\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T11:14:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T11:14:18","slug":"great-balls-of-fire-flaming-rugby-game-goes-up-in-smoke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/395317\/","title":{"rendered":"Great balls of fire: Flaming rugby game goes up in smoke"},"content":{"rendered":"

What could possibly make a midnight rugby match even more thrilling? Lighting the ball on fire would do it.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for a group of young men in Mackenzie St, North Dunedin at 11pm last night, their newly-discovered sport quickly came to the attention of emergency services, Acting Senior Sergeant Iain Notman, of Dunedin, said.<\/p>\n

Police went to the street, saw the men kicking the flaming ball, and gave them some education and preventive advice.<\/p>\n

They asked that the now extinguished ball remain unlit.<\/p>\n

There was no damage except to the rugby ball, Snr Sgt Notman said.<\/p>\n

laine.priestley@odt.co.nz<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What could possibly make a midnight rugby match even more thrilling? Lighting the ball on fire would do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-395317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}