Steelform Whanganui must keep victory at the forefront against Thames Valley on Saturday, because the final round of the 2025 Bunnings Heartland Championship season is the most unpredictable in years.

The Top 8 teams who will break out into the Meads Cup and Lochore Cup semifinal groups after this weekend cannot be ousted from the playoffs by any of the Bottom 4 teams, who are all mathematically eliminated and by a quirk of the draw are also playing each other.

The controversial event which saw former table leaders West Coast stripped of 15 competition points for fielding an unqualified player, which under NZR guidelines does not see the points redistributed to their vanquished foes King Country, East Coast and Whanganui, contributed to a log-jam which sees a spread of only five points between second place and eighth

Flying high above it all are the undefeated Mid Canterbury – from also-rans in 2023 they were shock Meads Cup finalists last year when they ended South Canterbury’s 39-game Heartland  winning streak in the semifinals, and have only grown stronger.

On Saturday, Mid Canterbury will defend the Hanan Shield against third place North Otago (5-2), who also got a long-deprived win over South Canterbury last weekend, as parity is slowly being restored in what is traditionally the toughest wider region in the competition – these three unions having eight Meads Cup trophies between them.

For fourth-placed South Canterbury (4-3), they have not only lost their invincibility tag, but have suffered back-to-back defeats for the first time since 2014, as the Mid Canterbury loss followed the unpredictable seventh-placed Poverty Bay (4-3) winning a last-minute thriller against them two weeks ago.

They will now host eighth-placed Horowhenua-Kapiti (4-3), who have locked away the Bill Osborne taonga for the season after a late kick snatched a one-point victory over neighbours Wairarapa-Bush (4-3), which also saw the Masterton union drop out of the Top 4.

Wairarapa Bush and Poverty Bay will now play each other in a crucial match for both, as the winner could mathematically get a solid Meads Cup playoff slot or at the least a home Lochore Cup semifinal.

All in all, the points table will look very different after Round 8’s games on Saturday, with the matches that count starting to kickoff from 1pm.

The draw is:

East Coast vs King Country, Ruatoria, 2:30pm; Wairarapa Bush vs Poverty Bay, Masterton, 1pm; Mid Canterbury vs North Otago, Ashburton, 2.05pm; Whanganui vs Thames Valley,Cooks Gardens, 2.05pm; West Coast vs Buller, Greymouth, 2.30pm; South Canterbury vs Horowhenua-Kapiti, Timaru, 2.05pm.

By Jared Smith