KEY POINTS:
It's one of the curiosities of the English language that the phrase "mathematical chance" is usually used to describe teams with no real chance at all.
For a playoff-chasing team, being damned with the false hope of mathematical possibility is about as comforting as a spear tackle. Describing a team as being "a chance to capture a playoff spot" means exactly what it says. Adding the word "mathematical" into the sentence reverses the meaning completely.
North Harbour, for instance, are still a mathematical chance of making the national championship quarter-finals. All they have to do is take maximum points off Auckland and Counties Manukau in their remaining two matches and hope other results go their way.
Of course, this calculation rather ignores the fact that Harbour have won just two of eight games this season and appear to be, without wanting to be too harsh, utter rubbish.
"MC" is also a catch-all phrase favoured by journalists who don't have the time or mental capacity to work out what results would actually be required for teams to either qualify or be eliminated from a competition.
Bitter experience has taught such journalists that hours spent poring over a ladder and a fixture list and running every conceivable scenario will almost invariably end in a complete cock-up. The safe option is to assign the "MC" tag to all and sundry and pop out for a kebab.
Heading into the penultimate round of the national championship, then, every team is in with a mathematical chance of making the playoffs. But the number of realistic contenders appears to be down to 10.
Last year Taranaki sneaked into the playoffs with a 4-6 record and 23 competition points. This year the cut-off point will be similar.
Auckland and Waikato head into the round outside the cut but with solid hopes of overtaking Otago and Tasman to snare the last couple of spots in the eight.
If they do, and are then boosted by the return of a horde of well-rested All Blacks, it could well set up a number of enticing quarter-final clashes. More by accident than design, the competition could be blessed with meaningful encounters right from the first week of the playoffs.
Leaving aside the obvious lack of fairness in some unions being able to stack their teams at the business end of the season, it would sure be a step up from last year when the top-four sides dispatched the bottom four without much ado.
In the two previous years of the Air New Zealand Cup, just one of the eight quarter-finals has been won by the away team. That was in 2006 when a North Harbour team suffering a massive Ranfurly Shield hangover turned belly up and lost 56-21 to Otago.
In comparison with other, more elongated finals systems - such as the NRL's McIntyre system or the top-six system used in Superleague - rugby's approach of straight quarter-finals, semifinals and a final has proved as exciting as your average Southland match.
The game's broadcaster, Sky TV, admitted as much last year, with chief executive John Fellet saying it favoured change. And change is what we are to get, with next year's competition event reverting to a straight semifinals and final format.
As usual with the NZRU, it's back to the future.
There's no shortage of evidence that a meaningful finals series is simply a must-have for any sport seeking the public's attention. But the NZRU has simply chosen to ignore it.
Their reasoning is that the competition must fit into a 13-week window and must have a full round robin. That means 12 teams playing an 11-week round robin, which leaves two weeks for the finals.
That sort of backward thinking says plenty about how the once-prized national competition is now viewed by the game's administrators. The 13-week window gives priority to club rugby and lets players have a decent off-season, but no consideration has been given to ensuring the competition ends in a way that will capture the imagination of fans.
Presumably the NZRU isn't expecting there to be any fans, with spectator interest to be directed towards the expanded Super Rugby competition. If that's what it wants, that's what it'll certainly get.
Sure, the 12 teams in the competition will all be in with a chance of making the semifinals. But by the midway point of the round robin there'll be a word preceding that chance - and it won't be "realistic".
Won't that be exciting.
