The ITM Cup: It truly is a numbers game.

Tonight's ITM Cup final at AMI Stadium between Canterbury and Waikato drew 10,200 people.

AMI stadium has a capacity of 36,000, and that crowd figure means less than a third was full.

The last 3 years finals’ numbers are not much better. 2009, there were 12,000 people at AMI Stadium. 2008, there were 21,327 at Westpac Stadium. 2007, there were 16,000 at Eden Park.

The semi-finals have not been much better. The Auckland versus Waikato match would have garnered about 10 – 15,000 people, the majority of those being Waikato supporters, and the Canterbury versus Wellington match would have had around the 10,000 mark as well.

Hell, even a free-ticket earthquake match in Christchurch could only get 20,000 people out of a possible 36,000.

Compare these figures to Rugby Leagues greatest showpiece, which garnered 82,334 people. This is once again dwarfed by AFL’s Grand Final, with 100,016 for the first final, and then a week later, after the first was a draw, 93,858 people.

The ITM Cup numbers make for pretty average reading. The NRL Grand Final had 8x the attendance of the ITM Cup Final while the AFL Grand Final’s had 10x and 9x the people respectively.

Yes Australia has approximately 5x our population, but the question is do they have 5x our passion? On those numbers you would certainly think so.

New Zealand’s big centres also too would suggest this. With the exception of Waikato; Auckland, Canterbury, Wellington, and Otago have been abysmal.

It's being left up to the smaller provinces, at this point to show the way. The problem with this, all of them are in the ‘bottom 7’ for next year, the second tier competition. One has to hope these provincial numbers won’t wane.

The provincial players are heroes in their provinces, an integral part of their towns. Not like the big centres that have got their players into the mould of being latte-sipping ‘superstars.’

Without the provinces, there would be no point having an ITM Cup. Here’s thinking the ‘bottom 7’ will have better crowd numbers than the ‘top 7.’

The New Zealand Rugby Union has a big job on their hands to get people interested back in provincial rugby. For at the moment, it is attendance levels are in a sorry state of affairs.

Does anyone sense that the financially unstable call will be rolled out again? Next time the NZRU should give the provinces with the poorest attendance per population the chop. Then you'd get the proper ITM Cup.

What do you all think?