Sliding Northland need to win

The chips are down for Northland as they prepare to head south for one of the biggest matches of their ITM Cup campaign against Otago on Sunday.
After last weekend's narrow loss to competition leaders Canterbury, Northland sit in eighth place and need a win to stop from sliding further down the table. The team's aim is to finish in the top half of the table to make the cut into next year's first division but they need to start beating Super-Rugby franchise teams like Otago if they want to achieve it.
"We talked about the importance of this week's game straight after the Canterbury game to be honest, and if we want to achieve our goals this season, this week is a pretty important game for us," said coach Bryce Woodward.
"We don't want to become besotted with outcomes but it's important that we go down there and play well," he said.
But beating Otago is never an easy proposition - no matter how poorly their season has started. Last year the Dunedin-based side outmuscled Northland in the forwards to demolish them 27-7 at Okara Park and the pressure will be on the Taniwha forwards in Dunedin to do better this year against the Otago tight five.
"I don't think Otago are playing as well as they did last year but we know they have some world-class athletes in their team like Ben Smith and Adam Thompson, as well as a few old war horses to back that lot up," Woodward said.
Former All Black Kees Meeuws and Woodward's choice as Barbarians captain in Whangarei earlier this year, Alando Soakai, are the type of players who will be invaluable to resurrecting the Otago cause after they lost their opening five games of the campaign.
"They've won the last two games in a row, while we haven't achieved that at all this season so we know it's not going to be easy and they'll be pretty combative up front so we have to be ready," Woodward said.
The Taniwha forwards can look forward to some key players returning from long-term injury. Last year's best loose forward Joel McKenty has recovered from his knee injury but is still short of game time and likely to miss this week's match, while prop Justin Davies is also nearing a return to full fitness after he also picked up a injury during the pre-season programme.
"It's great for Justin to be around and putting pressure on others because in the second half of the season we need a real lift in our scrummaging - we're pretty lowly ranked in that area and we think it's important to improve on that," Woodward said.
While the set-piece mostly performed well in a big test against Canterbury, it also had some conspicuous problems. "We lost one throw over the back that ended up causing a try for them and then we got smashed in the last couple of scrums which meant we didn't have confidence to set a scrum when we got that last penalty, so there's still some work to do." Woodward says the team is well past their more obvious set-piece problems earlier in the season but they can't afford to ease off at training.
"We're looking for some big improvements over the latter part of the season so we can move up into mid-table - in terms of scrumming and line-out - by the end of the year."
Northland at least have the bonus of Rene Ranger back from from the All Blacks. His combination with Jared Payne has been the catalyst for several tries already this year. Still absent for the Taniwha is former Otago player Aaron Bancroft.