RUGBY - Unprecedented crowd rattles Northland side

BAY OF PLENTY 15 NORTHLAND 10
It started with an unexpected minute of silence and ended with a wall of noise, but the game that Northland rugby were so desperate to win was stolen by a resolute Bay of Plenty team at Okara Park last night.
Bay of Plenty defeated Northland 15-10 in an Air NZ Cup match at Okara Park, the power of loose forwards Tanerau Latimer and Colin Bourke epitomising the grit of the Bay forward pack that ground out the victory.
But in the aftermath the result left a bitter after taste for the embattled Northland rugby team.
In front of 15,000 rabid rugby fans who had fronted to add substance to a week-long campaign to try to stave off the ghouls of demotion, they failed to deliver a win.
Now the Northland team are facing a massive test of character to try to save their season, a campaign that now hovers dangerously close to imploding in a tide of emotional overtones.
Sparked by news of impending forced demotion, the crowd, surely the biggest assembled for a Northland rugby fixture in more than 20 years, were still willing to cheer their sporting heroes from the pitch.
But the resonance of the scoreline was written all over the face of the Northland players as they trudged back to the showers behind their skipper Justin Collins. Stunned by the sheer size of the crowd, they had frozen when they needed to fire up.
"It was an outstanding atmosphere, I don't even know if it was a crowd that good for the second division final here 10 years ago," Collins said.
"I saw stage fright in a couple of guys too. I was worried that was going happen when the talk started about the crowd, and when the crowd did turn up it put a bit of pressure on," he said.
"With the rulings that have come out and all that other stuff, it did add a bit of extra pressure. I tried to talk it down this week but it just didn't quite come."
A try in each half by prop James McGougan and winger Lance MacDonald, with first five-eighth Mike Delaney kicking a penalty and a conversion helped Bay of Plenty maintain their unbeaten record this season.
Veteran playmaker David Holwell scored all the points for the home side, but Northland will be ruing all the missed chances they had in the last 10 minutes to win the game.
They were denied at least three opportunities to record their second win in the competition this season, through either the last pass not sticking or ball carriers opting not to pass to players outside them.
But the most glaring was a desperate dash to the chalk from Fetu Vainikolo, the Tongan who normally knows how to dot down. But when faced with the chance to score what would surly have been a match-clinching try, Vainikolo was shut down by Bay pivot Michael Delaney.
It could have capped of a momentous rugby occasion, one that started with a moment in silence to honour the death of former All Black and Northland rugby legend Ken Going and finished with a frenzied crowd trying to yell their team over the chalk.
But the fairytale finish never came, thanks mainly to a staunch display of tenacious defence from an under-rated Bay unit captained in follow-me style by Latimer.
"We knew it was going to be like that. We knew it was going to be one of those games were they just hammered and came out with a lot of passion we knew we had to take it and when we got the pill do the best we could with it," Latimer said.
Bay of Plenty 15 (Joe Savage, Lance MacDonald tries; Mike Delaney pen, con)
Northland 10 (David Holwell try; Holwell pen, con). Halftime 8-7.