NPC: Tale of two captains and a Hawke’s Bay Magpies dream

With eyes on the game, Magpies captains Jacob Devery and Tom Parsons look forward to the start of the sprint on Sunday, the 2025 NPC season opener against Counties-Manukau at McLean Park, Napier. Photo / Doug Laing

The pressure goes on the Hawke’s Bay Magpies right from the start of the 2025 Bunnings NPC as they try to claim the top division title for the first time in the competition’s first 50 years.

When the Magpies run out on to McLean Park, Napier, at 4.35pm on Sunday to open the campaign against Counties Manukau Steelers it will be as one of just three teams in the 14-team championship that have never won the title – the premiership or the first division as it was historically known.

The Magpies played the first-ever NPC first division match, against Auckland at McLean Park in front of 10,000 spectators on the Wednesday afternoon of May 12, 1976, and were beaten 10-7 - one try each, the difference a drop goal by Auckland first five-eighths Mark Sisam.

Reports of the match read like NPC fortune-telling for Hawke’s Bay, which, despite being the third most successful union in Ranfurly Shield rugby behind only Auckland and Canterbury, would spend years and years tossing between the first and second divisions.

In the book Fields of Glory, on the first 21 years of the NPC, author Steven Garland wrote regarding the passage of play after it became 7-all: “Displaying superior fitness, the home side dominated the remainder of the match, but were unable to complete what would have been a deserved upset victory after Mark Sisam’s 40m shot edged Auckland clear.”

The Bay won four matches that season, but without a win in 1978, were relegated.

They bounced back with an unbeaten record in Division 2 North Island in 1979, in which Sisam, transferred from Auckland, kicked a record five drop goals in one game, one half of it, in fact.

It was the first of five times Hawke’s Bay have won second division titles, which, having been handed a permanent spot in the first division in a four-team expansion with the introduction of the professional Air New Zealand Cup in 2006, was supplemented by three title wins in its second-tier championship.

They’ve reached the division one final just once, two years ago when beaten 22-19 by Taranaki.

The Hawke’s Bay Rugby Union had been desperate to become a first division regular, at one stage merging with Manawatū at NPC level to form the Central Vikings, a 1997-1998 second division experiment which, despite success on the field, ended at the NZRFU board table with a decision denying promotion.

Lock Tom Parsons - who started with the Magpies in 2012, and, with 95 appearances, is primed to claim the 100th in what he says is likely to be his last season - nails one issue, although it applies to all, when he describes the championship as “a sprint”.

“That’s how we look at it,” he says.

There are just 10 games in the regular season, which compares with 18 in the Japan One Rugby Division 1, in which he played this season for Urayasu D-Rocks, the 16 in American Major League Rugby, in which players included Magpies goalkicking ace Lincoln McClutchie and lock Frank Lochore.

There’s no real form guide for Sunday, other than that the Magpies have won their last four matches against the Steelers - the last two, in Napier in 2022 and Pukekohe in 2023, were by just one point - and that the Magpies started last season with four wins in a row, finished in fifth place while the Steelers were eighth. Both sides exited in the quarter-finals.

Tom Parsons of Hawke's Bay leads his team on to the field for his 100th first class match in 2022. Photo / Aaron Gillions / www.photosport.nz

Now long established as captain, father-of-three Parsons was named “co-captain” with Jacob Devery this season, although Devery indicates it’s a succession plan.

“He [Parsons] is the captain, I’m in a support role,” says Devery, who has played in 35 games for the Bay.

Parsons goes back to a match against Counties Manukau in 2013, the loss of the Ranfurly Shield just six days after Hawke’s Bay won the “the log” since the end of the 1966-1969 reign.

There was some redemption when the Magpies beat the Steelers in 2014 and took the shield back to Napier.

Devery is yet to be in a losing team against the Steelers.

For both, a career inspiration was hooker and captain Ash Dixon, the last player to achieve 100 appearances for the Magpies, while Devery, who became a Magpie at age 18 in his first year out of Hastings Boys’ High School, says he also had All Black Dane Coles at the Hurricanes, and the benefit of Magpies teammate Keanu Kereru Symes, with whom he’s been playing rugby for more than a decade.

At 34, Parsons has particular memories of one game, when playing for a teammate meant as much as playing for the team.

Going back to 2020, he says: “Ash Dixon’s 100th game down in Otago. We won the Shield. That one’s pretty special.”

Dixon departed at the end of the following season, to go to Japan, but captaincy successor Parsons is more likely to be hanging up the boots, saying he has had the chance to go back to Japan for another season, but it’s time to spend more time with the family.

Devery, 26, is in confident mood, saying he’s had a good season for the Hurricanes, and is ready for more with the Magpies, an experienced squad with several of the team approaching match milestones along the way.

They say much of the Magpies, and their leadership roles, is about making sure there is a culture the players enjoy, and turning that into success on the field, on Sunday, for starters.

“It’ll be a physical game,” Parsons says. “Hopefully, we’re going to be able to wear them down and come out on top.”

It is a big weekend of representative rugby in Hawke’s Bay, including NPC Heartland side Ngati Porou East Coast playing Central Hawke’s Bay sub-union at Park Island, and Te Matau a Maui Hawke’s Bay Maori playing Poverty Bay Maori at Maraenui Park, both on Saturday.

On Sunday, Wairoa sub-union will be defending the Barry Cup against East Coast side Ruatoria at Lambton Square, Wairoa.

The Schedule

The Magpies 2025 draw: Sunday August 3, 4.35pm, v Counties Manukau (home); Sunday August 10, 4.35pm, v Otago (away); Saturday August 16, 7.10pm, v North Harbour (home); Friday August 22, 7.10pm, v Canterbury (home); Saturday August 30, 4.35pm, v Northland (away); Saturday September 6, 2.05pm, v Wellington (home); Saturday September 13, 2.05pm, v Bay of Plenty (away); Friday September 19, 7.10pm, v Taranaki (away); Thursday September 25, 7.10pm, v Auckland (home); Saturday October 4, 7.10pm, v Manawatū (away).

Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 52 years of journalism experience, 42 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.