Chris Rattue: Not with a bang but with a whimper

From the 'be afraid, be very afraid' department ... For those brave enough to work their way past the format for rugby's Air New Zealand Cup, look no further than the opening few matches for potential horror stories.

The rugby union are stark raving bonkers kicking off their new competition with Hawkes Bay hosting mighty Canterbury on Friday night.

Why hang your dirty linen out on opening night, troops? It may seem like party time to send the might and power of New Zealand rugby galloping down rugby's memory lane, but there could be a hell of a hangover the next day.

Canterbury will still be able to field nearly an entire Super 14 side, complete with a fair few All Blacks, against a team that would struggle to fill a tractor tray with players boasting any experience in the NPC first division.

If - as is standard these days - the game is infested with old New Zealand pop songs every time there is a break in play, the Napier mob will have to dig as deep as the Hogsnort Rupert back catalogue to cope with the Canterbury tries.

As for Auckland and Manawatu kicking off the Saturday action, even one of Auckland's famous brain implosions shouldn't let Manawatu within 50 points.

And it's not as if champions Auckland are in one of their vulnerable moods. The new approach under coaches Pat Lam and Shane Howarth paid major dividends last year and is tailor-made for ripping apart a hapless foe, which in this case consists of blokes who are hardly household names in their own streets.

The Auks, who will be able to field close to 10 All Blacks, have even had a couple of extra weeks of training, thanks to the Blues' early, and now traditional, demise.

Next match ... you wouldn't fancy Counties Manukau getting within a bull's roar of Otago on Saturday afternoon, although you might suggest this match holds the chance of an upset given that Otago's new coaching regime may take time to settle in.

Fitness alone will find out the new chums. It's a gimme that the newcomers will run out of puff, during games and over the competition, so wouldn't it have been better to let them fill the lungs with early hope and the real possibility of competition points in round one? And it's hard to see how an early flogging will help build team confidence or ticket sales. At the very least, the NZRU could have avoided the sort of lopsided clash that will occur in Napier on Friday night.

Manawatu versus Tasman would have had a nice ring as an opener. Then again, the NZRU could have really cranked it up with, say, Auckland versus Wellington.

We may have to wait until Saturday night, when Taranaki tussle with Wellington, to get a decent stoush in the opening round, by which time all the flaws of this belated attempt to involve the forgotten provinces of New Zealand rugby in something meaningful would have been rudely exposed.

So to the NZRU, brave stuff lads, and I'll happily be proved wrong if the minnow provinces turn out to be anything above cannon fodder. But surely it would have been worth tweaking the opening-round draw in an entirely different direction?