Stat Attack
Paul Neazor brings you some quirky numbers and stats ahead of our three main provincial competitions.
Paul Neazor has all the quirky stats ahead of the NPC and Heartland Championship, not forgetting the Farah Palmer Cup.
Despite the fact a draw is still an accepted result in New Zealand firstclass rugby, there were none in championship games in 2020.
There was one, 31-31, between Mid Canterbury and south Canterbury at Timaru in a non-championship fixture. The draw is becoming a rare event, being gradually removed from the game by the American-style need to have a winner and a loser in every match. golden point it is.
we have a new sponsor for the domestic championship in 2021 – for the record third consecutive occasion it is a hardware merchant (bunnings warehouse).
Previous sponsors have included a radio network, breweries, insurance companies and an airline, but the run by building supplies firms is without precedent.
In a striking similarity of records, the seven Mitre 10 Premiership (as it was then) sides won five, six or seven matches in 2020 and scored between 251 and 299 points.
who remembers that Canterbury needed a bonus point win over leader Auckland in the last match of the season to avoid relegation? The Cantabs got it courtesy of a long late penalty goal from Chay Fihaki – his only goal of the season – to win 34-33.
None of Canterbury’s five 2020 matches in Christchurch were decided by more than one score – a far cry from the normal form shown by the locals.
Taranaki’s first home match in 2021, against Hawke’s Bay, is to be played at Pukekura Park in new Plymouth, these days better known as a cricket venue. but it was Taranaki’s home ground for some years until rugby Park was completed in the mid-1930s and hosted, among others, the 1908 Anglo-welsh, 1921 springboks and 1930 great britain teams.
If Jason rutledge goes round again for southland – and he seems to keep on keeping on – he could become the first player to appear 150 times for the stags; he’s on 143 games at the moment. Already, at 42, he’s the oldest player to take the field for Southland, even if he can’t quite match the previous record-holder, Ike Jenkins, in one regard: Jenkins played 22 consecutive seasons (1887-1908) and Rutledge has a few gaps in his extraordinary career.
A large player churn seems to be a part of every union’s problems each season, but that wasn’t the case with Hawke’s Bay in 2020. It won the championship with a 33-man squad, of whom 29 ended the season with at least 10 matches for the Magpies behind them.
Hawke’s Bay skipper Ash Dixon is a regular tryscorer these days, but it wasn’t always so. He scored his first NPC try, against Northland, in Hawke’s Bay’s first match of the 2015 season; it was his 76th NPC match and 55th first-class appearance for the Bay. At the time, nobody had played more competition matches without scoring a try. Last year he led the Bay tryscoring list with nine, mainly off the hooker’s best friend, a lineout drive. He is one of only nine active players who have scored 25 or more tries for their province; he has got them all in the last 53 of his 107 matches for Hawke’s Bay.
rene ranger (98 matches for northland) is poised to become the union’s 25th centurion; he is the only player in the top tier who has a realistic shot at reaching 100 matches for his union in 2021.