Power outages play havoc
Blues coach Mark Crosbie concedes the first five weeks of Southland premier club rugby has been frustrating.
The competition was expanded to 12 teams this year with two pools of six.
The top three from each pool – Star, Marist, Eastern-Northern Barbarians, Blues, Pirates-Old Boys, Woodlands – have advanced in the race for the Galbraith Shield.
The bottom three from each pool – Midlands, Wyndham, Edendale, Te Anau, Waikaka, Riversdale – will now play off for the Ack Soper Shield.
For Blues, they simply just want to play some rugby. Of their five pool games, they played just two of them.
Waikaka and Riversdale both defaulted to Blues, before on Thursday night a power cut put an end to another opportunity to get some game time.
Blues were scheduled to take on PiratesOld Boys at the Les George Oval at Oreti Park.
However a vehicle collided with a power pole in Otatara which cut the power to the lights at the field at the Les George Oval.
The power cut came 55 minutes into the curtain-raiser when Blues B led Star B 21-0.
When it became evident that the lights would not be back on in time for kick-off, Crosbie said they looked at moving the fixture to another venue, but that could not be sorted.
Instead both teams agreed to declare the game a draw and share the points.
The result had no impact on the standings, in terms of which teams progressed through to the Galbraith Shield competition.
‘‘We just wanted to play some rugby,’’ Crosbie said, before looking at the positive of their limited game time over the past five weeks.
‘‘We haven’t got many injuries, we haven’t played enough rugby to get injured,’’ he joked.
Despite the nightmare season to date, Crosbie still believed the expanded competition concept was something that needed to be persisted with. Many of the traditional division one teams had shown they were not far off the mark, he said.
Blues and Pirates-Old Boys will now square off in week one of the Galbraith Shield competition on Saturday.
Star also had a reduced workload through the first five games. Pirates-Old Boys defaulted to Star earlier in the season and Waikaka was also forced to default last week’s scheduled fixture.
A power cut also played havoc in the Edendale-Marist game at Edendale on Thursday night with the game abandoned after 55 minutes when the lights at the ground went out.
Marist was leading 35-5 at the time and it was decided that would be declared the final result.
Meanwhile, club rugby giant Woodlands seems to have woken after a challenging start to the 2019 season.
Woodlands had struggled through the first four rounds and at one stage looked in danger of missing out on qualifying for the Galbraith Shield competition.
However on Saturday it toppled the Eastern-Northern Barbarians 14-10 after trailing 10-7 at halftime.
The fixture was the first for new Stags signing Matt James who has linked with the Woodlands club.
James, a loose forward, was last year’s Canterbury B player of the year.
In the other premier fixtures Wyndham beat Riversdale 22-9 on Thursday afternoon, and Te Anau beat Midlands 19-17 at Limehills.