After the roaring crowd, household name opposition and national television coverage, it is back to simulating Bunnings Warehouse Heartland Championship conditions for Steelform Whanganui on Saturday.

The preseason continues with regular foe Hawke’s Bay Development XV, formally Saracens, coming to Cooks Gardens.

After the glitz and glamour of facing the Classics in front of the biggest home crowd since the 2016 Meads Cup final, for coach Jason Hamlin’s squad this match resumes regular operations. 

This includes a 23-man squad after 26 players were used last weekend, standard 40-minute halves instead of quarters, and fully contested scrums after the festive game was golden oldies.

Oh, and no pausing on restarts waiting for a television broadcast to come back from commercials either.

“Now the message is, ‘that’s great, but that’s done’. It would be great to get that amount of people [watching] again, but it’s about raising our level with intensity, and getting our game sorted,” said Hamlin.

“It’s hard enough with a really experienced group we’ve had for the last couple of years, but now we’ve got this new bunch of players – got some kids that when they start Heartland it will be their first provincial game.

“It’s exciting in that regard, there’s some talent there, just got to get it working in the right place.”

Hawke’s Bay named a 28-man squad last week to serve as their backup to the initial 39-man Magpies NPC team, with the prospect some of those squad members not required for the season opener with Counties Manukau will play this fixture.

For Whanganui, regular loose-forward and try-scorer against the Classics, Samu Kubunavanua, is unavailable with work commitments.

Among the injured veterans, it is still likely lock Peter-Travis Hay-Horton and hooker Alesana Tofa will not play until the start of Heartland, while backs Dane Whale and Timoci Seruwalu will resume some training duties next week.

Otherwise, all players are available, meaning a couple may miss out when the squad is officially announced Friday morning, with Hamlin expecting them to jump on with other representative teams.

Throughout the Heartland campaign, there will be fixtures for the McFall Fuel Whanganui Barbarians, Whanganui Pacifica, Whanganui Maori, and even the Northern sub-union team.

“We’ve got all these things, other avenues we can play games at, so there’s all sorts we can keep people playing when they’re not involved with us,” said Hamlin.

“That’s what we need them to be doing too, the guys that don’t make the team need to go away and be playmakers and run [the other] teams, and get tempo of games, because that’s what they’ll have to do if they come back up.”

With the coveted No15 jersey open due to the departure of Tyler Rogers-Holden, Hamlin has a couple of options.

Adam Boult, with 14 games for Manawatu, covered the wing last Saturday, while in his return to the team for the first time since 2018, Harry Symes scored and laid on a couple of try-assists, before handing over to debutant Chad Whale.

Hamlin was happy with the first-up efforts of imports Matt Picard at hooker and halfback Cody Mitchell, both of whom had petitioned to join the team and were really excited by the atmosphere with the Classics, although now they will get a sense of what standard provincial rugby is really like.

“Matt at hooker did his core roles well, which is all we really want out of him - he was solid,” said Hamlin.

“We’ll see what that looks like on Saturday, adding scrumaging into the mix as well.

“Daniel Kauika played really well in that first 30-40 minutes, and then Cody came on with a lot of changes, so that makes it difficult.

“But he can add a bit of tempo to our game, pretty happy with both of them.”

One big work-on for the entire squad is cover tackling, after leaking 28 points in the final quarter with the Classics.

“We didn’t defend as well as we would have liked, so that was a focus on Tuesday night, just getting numbers around the corner and how we put the right numbers in the right place, then trust people from there.”

Kickoff is 2.30pm.
 

By Jared Smith