NPC rugby: Hawke’s Bay’s Ranfurly Shield-winning team of 23 named again for playoff with Bay of Plenty

A day in the sun at training on Wednesday, from left, squad members Harry Godfrey and Lincoln McClutchie, coach Brock James and halfback Folau Fakatava. Photo / Warren Buckland

Hawke’s Bay Magpies head coach Brock James has put his faith in the team that won and partied with the Ranfurly Shield last weekend.

James has named the same 23 for Sunday’s National Provincial Championship semifinal as those who took on and beat Wellington 20-18 last weekend.

The team announcement on Saturday morning marks a move back to the focus on the primary goal of the season amid a week, and a shield, of two halves – from the highs of the shield challenge win to the lows of breaking the shield itself during post-match revelry.

That revelry is now part of a New Zealand Rugby inquiry and is also, in one case, in the hands of police after a player was charged with drink driving after a crash into a fence in suburban Napier.

The shield isn’t at stake on Sunday, but what is at stake is the Magpies’ dream of being the first Hawke’s Bay team to win the NPC in the 48 seasons it was first played in 1976.

Hawke’s Bay’s lot has rested with a series of wins in the lower divisions, and a best-ever result of topping the ladder but being beaten in a semifinal two years ago, in a 2021 season hit by the disruption of the Covid-19 crisis.

They have reached the semifinals four times and a repeat is on the radar again, after the Magpies finished fifth on the ladder, just a point behind fourth-placed Bay of Plenty in an outcome effectively a consequence of the Steamers’ 38-35 win in the Battle of the Bays in Napier on September 9.

In a quirk of the impact of bonus points on the 14-team competition table, both bays won seven of their 10 games, but finished behind Canterbury, who scraped into third despite having won just six matches.

The Ranfurly Shield win, over the defending champions and on Wellington’s home turf against a side striving to extend a union winning sequence record to 20 matches, showed the vintage-2023 Magpies can beat anyone, despite the mid-competition blip of losses to Auckland and Northland away and then to Bay of Plenty.

The steadying of the course came in a 57-7 win over Manawatu on September 15 at McLean Park, the Magpies’ last home game of the season unless BoP and the top three are all beaten in the quarter-finals or semifinals.

For the players, it has been said this week getting the win on Sunday is “personal”, their pride on the line after the fiasco.

Some may see it as even more personal, for in 2019 Hawke’s Bay was beaten 12-7 by Bay of Plenty in Rotorua in the final of the NPC’s then “Championship” division, when chasing promotion to the Premiership.

In that match, Magpies wing Jonah Lowe, who will be in action again on Sunday, scored the only try, all of the Steamers points coming from penalty goals. It was tense at the end with the Magpies stringing together 28 phases but being held out by the Bay of Plenty defence.

Lowe is one of 13 in Sunday’s 23 who played in that match, as is first-five-eighths Lincoln McClutchie, the only Magpie to have started in all 10 matches this season to date.

McClutchie has scored 103 points in the process and now has 432 in all games for Hawke’s Bay since his debut in 2018, just three points short of the 435 scored by 1956-1965 player Tony Small, who is fourth on the list of the top scorers in the near 140 years of Hawke’s Bay senior representative rugby.

The TAB installed Bay of Plenty the favourite to win, paying $1.62 on Friday morning with Hawke’s Bay paying $2.35.

The Team for Sunday’s game at Tauranga Domain, starting at 2.05pm, is:

1 Pouri Rakete Stones, 2 Tyrone Thompson, 3, Joel Hintz, 4 Geoff Cridge, 5 Tom Parsons (captain), 6 Marino Mikaele Tu’u, 7 Josh Kaifa, 8 Devan Flanders, 9 Brad Weber, 10 Lincoln McClutchie, 11 Jonah Lowe, 12 Chase Tiatia, 13 Nick Grigg, 14 Ollie Sapsford, 15 Lolagi Visinia.

Subs: 16 Jacob Devery, 17 Tim Farrell, 18 Bo Abra, 19 Frank Lochore, 20 Sam Smith, 21 Folau Fakatava, 22 Stacey Ili, 23 Caleb Makene.