Rep match canned

A spate of injuries and unavailabilities have led to Wairarapa-Bush withdrawing from their non-championship rugby match with Manawatu in Palmerston North tomorrow.
WBRFU chairman Bryan Weatherstone said the action was regrettable but the decision had been taken because Wairarapa-Bush were unable to field a competitive side.
And those sentiments were echoed by coach Kelvin Tantrum who said that if the match had gone ahead he would have been forced to field several players who had not even trained together, a recipe for disaster against a Manawatu side understood to include as many as 13 of their Air New Zealand Cup squad.
"Cancelling was the last thing we wanted to do but for me player welfare was the biggest issue," said Tantrum,who himself hails from Manawatu and has been involved in the coaching of both their top men's and women's sides in past years.
Among a long list of players either injured or available for tomorrow's game were key forwards Dan Griffin and Mike Spence and leading backs James Bruce, Patrick Rimene, Nathan Couch and Charlie Walker-Blair.
Weatherstone said the Wairarapa-Bush union respected the tradition which went with games against provinces like Manawatu, Wellington and Hawke's Bay but the stage had been reached where Wairarapa-Bush could no longer hope to compete with them on an even keel, something illustrated by the recent huge losses to a Wellington XV (98-0) containing mostly developmental squad players and a Hawke's Bay XV (77-0) including only a handful of their premier team.
"The toll these games is taking on our amateur players is too high and we beleive if they front up to a strong Manawatu Turbos team they would achieve little more than tackling practice and further injuries," Weatherstone said, adding that the value of such matches had been discussed by the WBRFU board last year and would be again soon. His felt ,ore meaningful "friendlies" could be organised against other Heartland championship sides, perhaps those who Wairarapa-Bush were not drawn to play against in the pool games of the championship itself.