RUGBY - As injuries bite, Northland need to nurture some depth

Suddenly the Northland rugby campaign is threatening to unravel.
The loss to Taranaki on Saturday was a blow for a team that is trying hard to restore some rugby pride in a province still bruised from successive seasons as the doormat of the provincial championship.
But you have to wonder if we should have been expecting it.
Were we just fooling ourselves?
At Homeworld Stadium in Whangarei on Saturday, Taranaki weren't very good, but Northland were worse.
Now the microscope is falling on a coaching staff that has been too reliant on too few and is suddenly being forced to ask too much of a group of inexperienced players.
It is where the most obvious deficiencies in what is otherwise a sound and robust Northland rugby regime under coaches Mark Anscombe and Bruce Robertson are apparent.
It appears as if Anscombe has unwavering faith in about 17 of his 26-strong squad, and very little regard for the rest of them. As a coach, Anscombe doesn't deal in platitudes. He simply demands performance.
There are players in his squad who don't seem to be responding though.
Take these bitter post-match comments from Anscombe as a guide: "I think a lot of them showed themselves up for struggling to be able to mentally switch on and play rugby at this level," Anscombe said.
"We just lacked any composure. We lacked a hunger to compete at the breakdown. They were beating us in the collision area and they were dominating us. We were going high in the tackle and not playing with any urgency."
On Saturday, experience was a double-edged sword. In the next few weeks of the competition, when Northland play Auckland, Hawke's Bay, Counties Manukau and Waikato needing at least two wins or several bonus points to make a quarterfinal, the truth may cut even deeper.
Against Taranaki on Saturday, Northland first lost grafting lock Dan Goodwin to a serious ankle strain, then play-making No.8 Jake Paringatai with a wrenched shoulder.
Even before kick-off, they had to bypass fullback Hayden Taylor.
The players who stepped in didn't make much impact. Under that sort of pressure, who would?
They lacked self-belief because they knew they only made it onto the paddock by proxy.
The fact now is that Anscombe is likely to lose one of his favoured first 15 permanently.
Hayden Taylor, the 100-plus game veteran, is out with a neck injury. Scans have revealed, in layman's terms, a crook neck, caused by what the medically inclined are calling a bulged disc.
This news is not good for Taylor, who has been offered divergent prognoses, the first saying he should be right, the second suggesting that, if he was a forward, he would be wise to retire immediately.
It doesn't stop there either. David Holwell is playing with a shoulder that will need surgical repair, Rene Ranger can't throw off a dodgy hamstring and the injuries to Paringatai and Goodwin look like serious sidelining fodder.
So the big flaw in the long overdue Northland rugby resurgence is being exposed - the lack of credible depth.
Like a big ocean-going freightliner, the good ship Northland rugby has finally turned around.
We, at the very least, are heading in the right direction. Well, we were anyway.
The challenge now is obvious, the ship needs to stop at a few ports, possibly overseas ones, and add some players to the cargo inventory.
In the meantime, Anscombe might do well to lighten up. He needs his less favoured benchmen to perform now, and they need him to help them.