Paul Lewis: The good ship NPC continues to sink

'Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic' has become a firm entry in the 21st century lexicon, meaning people who see a disaster looming but take only meaningless measures. If the NPC was a ship, the bloke in the eagle's nest would be hollering his lungs out about the iceberg but his words would go unheard. All the intended audience would be in the lounge, watching television.

While the NZRU is trying hard to breathe some life into the grand old dame of New Zealand rugby, the plain fact is that it might have turned up its tootsies by now if it wasn't for the Ranfurly Shield acting as an oxygen tent.

See Friday night's Shield game between Canterbury and Wellington as a reference. Also on Friday, the NZRU announced the $8m handout to the provinces to go with efforts to equalise the talent spread. It's a worthy quest - but perhaps doomed. Long term, NPC attendances are falling. Some commentators would have it that the NPC is "the new club rugby" and that we must view it with new, lesser expectations. But presumably any version of the NPC will still want to attract crowds - and more of them than many are drawing right now - and I don't remember any sporting competition anywhere succeeding because it had reduced expectations. The logic escapes me. And will the throngs be back when Manawatu and Hawke's Bay come into the first division fold next year?

Um, well, no. The most likely result is that one, or both, of these sides will give Northland the ability to do what they haven't for two years now - win a game. The crowds will continue to come in numbers that don't really justify the expression 'crowd'.

We have all tacitly accepted that Northland, part of the folklore of New Zealand rugby, are now permanently fixed in a kind of Groundhog Day of recurring losses. Mismatches don't benefit any level of rugby - even club. Meanwhile, on the opening day of the Guinness rugby premiership in the UK, Wasps and Saracens attracted 35,000.

The issue is not that the NPC has fallen down the pecking order of our rugby competitions. It is rather that it is a dinosaur dating from the amateur, provincial days which, fine though they were, are long gone in this country. No one knows what killed the dinosaurs but we might all get a grandstand view of this one - or, rather, we'll watch it on TV.

Just about all of us can see that expanding the number of teams, or even reducing them, isn't going to save the NPC. Maybe we need a new idea, a new concept which takes us away from the old. It's like trying to wear the same pair of shoes you wore as a 10-year-old. They just don't fit.

All competitions have a sell-by date. In the UK, for example, alarm bells are going off for the English Premiership - hailed as the best sporting league in the world about a decade ago but now losing fans and interest.

Of the 20 Premiership clubs, nine have falling crowd averages as against a year ago - not quite crisis level yet but even the few who have increased numbers are those either promoted from a lower division or who have struck a vein of form. Fans are deterred by high ticket prices; a glut of games on TV; the greed of players made fat by high salaries from whopping TV revenues; and by the mediocrity of much of the competition.

Many games are ruled by clubs desperate to hang on to Premiership status, and the financial bounty it brings, and who play safety-first football to survive as opposed to playing to win.

Michael Clarke, chairman of the Football Supporters Federation, told the Daily Telegraph that a crisis is looming. "Supporters have had enough of being ripped off. The Premiership is boring. It is no longer competitive. And there is a negative attitude to players' wages. It is all a bit of a turn-off."

The proof is there every weekend.

Many New Zealanders follow Blackburn Rovers, the team of New Zealand captain Ryan Nelsen. Blackburn are, to be polite, about as thrilling as finding a cigarette end in your soup. They have now gone four EPL games without a goal. They went down 3-0 to Newcastle, who are coached by Graeme Souness, a controversial figure who used to coach Blackburn. Crowd numbers were down 9,000 for this supposedly compelling fixture.

Clarke and his cohorts are seeking action to reverse the trend.

Sound familiar? With the NPC, we can all see the iceberg coming.

Never mind the deckchairs. We need to construct a whole new ship. Fast.