KEY POINTS:
With so much focus on what will become of it next year, it's hard to know what to make of this year's national provincial rugby championship.
Now in its third year, the Air New Zealand Cup has delivered on many of its objectives. Most notably, it has successfully
spread the gospel of top class rugby further into the provinces, and heralded the resurrection of Hawkes Bay as something resembling a rugby power.
It is a touch ironic, then, that the teams most under threat from imminent restructuring are Tasman, Manawatu, Counties Manukau and Hawkes Bay.
Now, before all you Magpies fans start filling up my inbox again, there is a significant difference between the challenges facing your mob and those other expansion teams.
For Tasman, Counties and Manawatu, the challenge is to survive the forthcoming cull from 14 to 12 or even 11 teams that has been signalled by the NZRU. For Hawkes Bay, the biggest success story of the expanded competition, the key is for the competition itself to retain enough lustre to match their rising ambitions.
An ever-expanding financial black hole in its current form, there is every chance the national championship will be downgraded to an amateur feeder competition. If that happened, and Hawkes Bay is overlooked as a base for a Super Rugby expansion team, the Magpies will find themselves isolated, without a competition that meets their needs. Everything they have built over the past three years would have been for naught.
Having also built a successful operation - off the field at least - Manawatu must be pondering a similar fate. Tasman have been a hit with the fans but a disaster with the accountants and have already hit the self-destruct button, while Counties have sacrificed short-term on-field performance for prudent financial management.
Bay of Plenty, Northland and Southland have been dismal financial failures and must also be wondering whether the axe is hovering.
With that sort of backdrop, and given that on-field results will receive only minimal weighting when the unions are sized up for the chopping block, it's hard to know just what the games themselves really mean.
Aside from the money drain, the Cup's biggest failure has been its inability to produce a more level competition.
Wellington start favourites to lift the title at $3.25, closely followed by Auckland and Canterbury at $3.50 and Waikato at $5. Next are Hawkes Bay at $15. Just four teams. The same four teams it has been every year since Otago's star began it's rapidly accelerating dive. It's hard not to yawn. Or maybe even cry, if you're a nostalgic type.
Then again, for those people that actually bothered to follow last year's competition - and by all accounts there weren't many outside of Napier and Palmerston North - there was some outstanding rugby played.
Auckland's team of polished veterans played a superb brand of rugby, while Hawkes Bay's quarter-final victory over Waikato was one of the most gripping games of the entire rugby year.
This year will be different. Not necessarily worse, just different.
Auckland will still boast plenty of backline punch through the likes of Isaia Toeava, Benson Stanley and, from September, Joe Rococoko, but they will be well down on experience and polish in key positions.
Waikato and Canterbury have also been heavily hit by the overseas player drain, leaving Wellington with the most experienced squad.
Hawkes Bay will look at anything lower than a fifth-placed finish as disappointing, while Taranaki and Northland have decent enough smatterings of talent within their ranks to be considered dark horses. Beyond that, however, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will likely have grown as team's such as Bay of Plenty put financial prudence ahead of on-field competitiveness.
Typically, at the start of any competition, even the biggest outsiders will say their goal is to win it. It is perhaps the biggest indictment of this failing competition that that won't be the case this year. For many, it will be all about survival.
