The New Zealand-based NRL team will play the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs at Forsyth Barr Stadium on Friday, March 17 at 8pm.
It will be a home game for the Bulldogs, as they were forced to shift their round two and three matches due to bookings at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium by Justin Bieber and Adele.
New Zealand Rugby League’s South Island general manager, Steve Martin, said the game would be a huge boost for the sport in the region.
"We’ve been rebuilding the game steadily over the past four or five years and these sort of events just give everything a bit of a kick-start," he said.
He said the NZRL would work with Dunedin Venues to arrange events in the community leading up to the game.
Those would probably include making the players available for the public to meet, as well as giving the region’s coaches the chance to learn from their NRL counterparts.
Dunedin Venues chief executive Terry Davies said it had been in talks with the Bulldogs for over a year, having had an eye on bringing a top NRL club to the stadium.
"It was just persistence. We regularly contact the NRL; we’re in the front end just talking about clubs and what their movements are," he said.
"We’ve got our ears to the ground on clubs that are looking to reallocate matches elsewhere and we’re always on the front line talking to their management about opportunities.
"So this conversation has been going on for quite some time, to be honest, with us just pestering them to try to bring them down to this part of the world."
The Bulldogs had taken games to Hamilton and Wellington in 2014 and 2016 and saw this as yet another opportunity to grow their New Zealand fan base.
The game would come at a busy time for the city sporting-wise, with a Highlanders game against the Crusaders and a Black Caps test against South Africa also in that period. Talks had been going on with the club for more than a year and Davies said it was good to be able to deliver different content.
Ticket prices had not been set, although Davies hoped the game would attract 20,000 people. Likewise, Martin expected a big crowd, particularly as it was the only NRL game scheduled for the South Island next year.
