Rugby: Culhane's men desperate for points in 'Naki

Josh Bekhuis has played every minute of Southland's 11 games. Photo / Getty Images

Imagine this. You fancy your chances of making the semifinals of the national championship.

Your team are pretty tasty on their home turf, awkward to beat away from home and you've got some pretty good footballers.

You know it won't be a cinch, but you're certainly a decent chance. Then you get the draw, run your eye down to the final weekend and what do you see? Vs Canterbury (a). Call it a sinking feeling.

Certainly you'd want to get a bit of insurance, in the form of points, in the bank before that date rolls round.

That is Southland's lot, and the big reason why beating Taranaki in their penultimate round robin game in Invercargill tonight is top of the must-do list.

The Air New Zealand Cup is so tight that a slip up could be curtains, as it it was for Bay of Plenty and Tasman last weekend. Southland sit fourth on 33 points, two clear of Waikato, who should beat Northland in Hamilton tomorrow, and three ahead of Auckland, who will be strongly fancied to topple bottom side Counties-Manukau on Sunday.

Co-coach Simon Culhane, master of understatement, said visiting the defending champions last is "not ideal", but the lure of still being in the semifinal frame, and the fact it'll be a Ranfurly Shield challenge will help.

But first things first, and that means toppling Taranaki tonight.

"I guess we know what we've got to do," former All Black Culhane said yesterday. "It's like last week, backs against the wall and we've got to front up again. If we keep winning we get there, so we're still in control of our own destiny."

Last week Southland responded to the challenge with a 41-0 duffing of Tasman, in 80 minutes both reviving their campaign after back-to-back defeats to Wellington and Auckland, and ending Tasman's spirited charge for the top four.

Culhane likes that it's a simple setup, no need for calculators or slide rules, although he acknowledged "players being players" some of his have been doing computations on what might happen.

"It hasn't been too hard mentally to get the boys up because we've been doing some pretty good things," he said of a season when he and co-coach David Henderson have been talking processes and the way they are playing rather than getting hung up on final scorelines.

"At the end of the day if you play well and tick all the boxes with what we're trying to do on the field then hopefully results will come. Now, we've just got to keep going."

Southland have the best performed lineout in the competition, in which organiser Josh Bekhuis has been outstanding, to the point of getting honourable mentions in amateur selectors' All Black squads for the Northern Hemisphere tour, to be named on Sunday.

He has played every minute of Southland's 11 games - how many other locks can say the same? - and calls and analyses the lineouts.

Culhane won't disagree that the panel could do much worse than pick the 2m 24-year-old.

One Southlander sure of getting a plane ticket is halfback Jimmy Cowan. Another assertive performance from the No9 tonight will give Southland a strong guiding hand against Taranaki.