Provincial match off?

Press, 29 August 1984, Page 64

Provincial match off?

By

JOHN COFFEY

It is now most unlikely that Canterbury and Waikato will meet in their scheduled representative rugby league match this season. Canterbury, the winner of the southern zone first division championship, was to have played off against its northern counterpart, Waikato, at Christchurch, on August 25, according to the calendar of dates released by the New Zealand Rugby League at the start of the season. But that was the weekend of the Canterbury club championship semi-finals and negotiations have been under way for some time to find a new date. Waikato offered Canterbury a match in the north on September 15, the day before Hornby defends the Thacker Shield against the West Coast champion, Runanga. Mr M. A. Underwood, the secretary-manager of the Canterbury Rugby League, said ; yesterday that Waikato’s suggestion had to

be declined on two counts — Hornby provided half of the members of the Canterbury team, and Waikato had not been able to offer a worthwhile travel subsidy. The inter-provincial series, greatly overshadowed by the inter-dis-tricts championship in early season, the tour by Great Britain and the forthcoming national Tusk Cup inter-club knock-out, has been the one weak link in the code’s firstclass programme. Its chances of succeeding suffered a serious initial blow when Auckland declined to meet the winner of the northern-southern playoff, claiming it could not fit such a match into its fixture list. That immediately removed the incentive for others to tilt at New Zealand’s top province. Wellington then withdrew from the southern section after a wrangle over dates with Canterbury and West Coast, leaving the two strongest South Island provinces with nothing more than a home-and-away series. *