Chris Laidlaw: Canary in mine needs guarding

The only thing certain is that the provincial championship is the canary in the mineshaft of domestic rugby. Photo / Sarah Ivey

The mood around the country seems to suggest provincial rugby is on the way back. Some of that euphoria may be due to the feel-good factor whenever the All Blacks win handsomely but there's more to it than that.

There's a sense New Zealand rugby is finally getting its priorities sorted out.

A year or two ago, the NPC looked on its deathbed. There was open warfare between the smaller, cash-strapped unions and the metropolitan establishment dominated by obscure businessmen and an NZRU board seemingly preoccupied with the professionals' capacity to raise more money.

Appearances are everything. There are extreme sensitivities in rugby's heartland. Many of the smaller provinces were feeling shut out of Super rugby. They had been forced to keep their traps shut because they received payments from the competition revenues.

But as that revenue stream dried up, the smaller provincial unions became ever more suspicious of the city businessmen on franchise boards. They became highly critical, sometimes irrationally so, of the way the system is run.

They were being pitted against each other in the hunt for players who could pull them up to somewhere near competitive with the big, wealthy metropolitan unions. Professionalism was a red rag to a bull and they carried more weight in the local rugby community than the NZRU.

So what's changed? Last year, after protracted negotiation, the provinces, players' association and NZRU agreed, finally, on a realistic salary cap.

This was perhaps the most significant step forward in the last decade; a rare example of people giving and taking in the best interests of a desperate game.

It means, at least in theory, the equalisation of opportunity for all provinces and a stemming of the ruinous payments smaller provinces had to make to secure enough talent to become competitive. It should, in theory, mean a better distribution of talent and make for a more compelling NPC.

Is the salary cap working to spread the playing talent more evenly? It's probably too soon to judge but if you asked Manawatu, for instance, which lost game-breaking stars to bigger, richer unions the answer would probably be no. The same might be said of Hawke's Bay and Otago. Yet look at Counties Manukau, or Tasman, or Southland - they look genuinely competitive for the first time in decades.

There is also an unevenness in crowd numbers. In the main centres, the crowds are lamentable. When Canterbury hosted Auckland, we might have expected a full house but the crowd was pitifully small.

The same goes for Wellington, Hamilton, Auckland and Dunedin.

By contrast, crowds in the smaller centres, notably Tasman, Invercargill, Pukekohe and Whangarei, have been good, in some cases marvellous.

So what's going on? Have the big city punters had enough, what with all that Super 14 and test match stuff? Is it the case that in the heartland, they can't get enough? Is this a pattern that will become permanent?

The only thing certain is that the provincial championship is the canary in the mineshaft of domestic rugby.

It must always be the first priority of the rugby community and protected from the ravages of the market because if it fails, so too does the infrastructure in the provinces - the clubs, the volunteer force and the emotional attachment of communities to their team. And without that, what have we got?