In case you hadn’t noticed, the Air New Zealand NPC is now the Air New Zealand Cup – clever move by the sponsors don’t you think, if you leave out the sponsor name you just get the word Cup. Prediction – people will still call it the NPC. At least Jim Smylie should be pleased that I have mentioned Air New Zealand four times already and I am not even out of the first paragraph.

So why, you may ask, is the new NPC going to suck? Well let’s start by looking at the competition it is going to replace, the “old NPC”. The First Division comprised 10 teams and for the last 3 seasons, 9 of these teams have been competitive. During this time, there have been quite a few upsets and unfancied teams (including the mighty unsponsored Bay of Plenty Steamers) have made the semis, even DS Waikato scraped in one year. A quick look at the win-loss record for the round-robin over these 3 seasons shows this.

Some of the closeness can be put down to the absence of the All Blacks for the early part of the season – however this table illustrates just what a close competition the NPC has been.

The fact that Northland has not won a game during this time, yet has twice managed to win the promotion/relegation game would suggest that expanding the NPC would be a dangerous task. Add 2 teams and you would expect these new teams to struggle along with Northland, add 4 teams and 5 out of the 14 will be weak.

Maybe you haven’t looked closely at the format of the new NPC yet. The 14 teams have been split into 2 groups of 7. Each team plays the others in their group (6 games) and the top 3 in each group go into a league of 6 where games are played between teams from the opposite groups (3 games). From what I can see, these 6 are playing for the right for 4 of them to host a quarter-final and then presumably a semi and final. The other 8 teams battle it out in 2 groups of 4 (3 games), the winner of each group to make the quarter-finals.

All pretty clear isn’t it? If all goes to form, the 9 top teams will play 9 games each by which time the number of teams will be reduced to ……. 8! How exciting!! Imagine the excitement gripping the nation when Canterbury plays Auckland in week 8 when they both already have a home quarter-final. Not to mention the final weekend of the first group stage when the fixtures are :-

That’s really going to grab the attention of the rugby and TV watching public.

Once they have secured a quarter-final place, which of the top sides is going to take the rest of their games seriously until the quarter-final itself? If Northland are as poor as they have been these last 3 seasons, a team such as DS Waikato may well clinch a quarter final place by beating Southland in Round 2 – their first game. They then have another 8 games to play before they actually play a critical game again. Give me the old format any day where making the top 4 was an achievement and Auckland don’t qualify occasionally.

Who came up with this monstrosity of a playing format? It smells of a committee decision to prevent any province (except maybe North Otago) feeling upset. With the extended All Black programme, are they just making sure that there is no interest at all in the NPC so there will be no complaints at the lack of star players? How are Manawatu going to build a squad to cope with playing Taranaki never mind one to battle against Canterbury? I accept that these provinces will improve with more games against the top provinces but is it worth doing at the expense of destroying all interest in the competition?

So where do the mighty unsponsored Steamers sit in the new order? If last season is anything to go by, we will struggle to make the top 3 of our group and be forced into a showdown match with a province such as Southland in order to scrape into the quarter-finals. If we do make it, we will no doubt have to travel to Canterbury to be crushed once again. All the loyal fans will still be at the games, but how many of the floating support are going to be gripped by a home game against Counties in the second phase?

Let’s start the campaign now – bring back the old NPC!