Run it, don’t kick it.
Bring back the star players.
And put the games on during the afternoon.
Arthur is part of the furniture at the Alhambra-Union club and was the manager of the Otago Rugby Football Union academy for 11 years until he moved on in 2009.
He knows his rugby. He loves his rugby. But he also has mixed feelings about NPC.
"I quite like watching it because it’s a little bit like club rugby in the fact that there’s a reasonable amount of evenness among a number of the teams.
"But the style of rugby these days is too predictable."
You hear that a lot from some of the more seasoned fans. Those of us of a certain vintage tend to look at rugby in the 1990s through a filter which makes everything wonderful.
It was not always wonderful.
But modern rugby does tend to be dominated by defence. It can be grinding, attritional and lacking flair. And it is played in front of ever-dwindling crowds.
Otago played in an empty-looking Forsyth Barr Stadium this season. The crowd topped 2000 just once.
"If you want to get the crowds back to watch NPC rugby, you’ve got to make it an attractive package. At the moment, it’s not an attractive package.
"We’ve talked about this for a number of years. The number of forwards out in the backs are stifling back play."
Rucks are not the same. They are not the pile of bodies they used to be. Teams commit fewer players to the heap. The rest of the forwards fan out across the field.
Those yawning gaps which were once available for the likes of Jeff Wilson and Brendon Laney are now plugged with 120kg loose forwards who are just waiting around to smash you to the ground.
There is just no space.
Arthur’s answer to that is to tinker with the rules.
"Perhaps the offside line needs to be looked at. Take it back. At the moment it’s the base of the ruck, or last man’s feet."
Southern chairman Blair Crawford wears several hats. He is the deputy chairman of the Metropolitan Council of Rugby Clubs and runs the match committee.
Like Arthur, he is a permanent fixture on the sidelines during the club season.
Crawford has been going to NPC games since the early 1980s, when Otago were rather poor.
"There wasn’t a big crowd then," he said, adding it was not until Laurie Mains took over and Otago enjoyed some success before the crowds returned to Carisbrook.
"I used to run on the field and would get autographs from the likes of Bruce Robertson and JK [John Kirwan] and Andy Haden.
"I guess that’s something that’s missing a little bit, isn’t it?"
Sure is. The best players are not playing a lot of NPC rugby these days.
The competition was immediately relegated in status when Super Rugby emerged in 1996.
In 2006, the competition was restructured. The top 14 teams were divided into two tiers — the premiership and the championship — and the bottom 12 unions were split off into the Heartland Championship. And the promotion-relegation system, which allowed for movement between the old three-division format, was ditched.
It created a divide between the bigger and smaller unions.
"The product that was created with Super Rugby has taken away from that provincial scene and how it once was," Crawford said.
"If they were able to re-do things, I don’t believe they’d end up with what they have now.
"It’s probably oversimplistic because it’s not as easy as it sounds, but I would have stuck with the NPC as your professional game and had the tiers like in professional soccer."
Somewhere along the way, the NPC lost its identity.
It is no longer the direct pipeline for the All Blacks it once was. The Super Rugby clubs have those bases covered.
It became a feeder competition for Super Rugby. But even that role has diminished with the schools and the Super Rugby teams taking a more active role in developing their own players.
Where does that leave the NPC?
Arthur actually went through an exercise trying to find a solution to that question.
"I remember when I was in an academy managers meeting. We got divided up into three groups and we were given that question to answer.
"And our group came up with a bit of a radical idea. We thought you could run NPC rugby in tandem with Super Rugby.
"That was just an idea that was floated.
"The consensus was you could fit NPC rugby and Super Rugby together, but then club rugby would suffer."
That is the problem NZR is facing now as it considers making changes to the NPC to make it more financially sustainable.
You pull one lever and another one pops out on the other side.
"I don’t think it’ll survive in its current format, because it’s just going to fade away," Arthur said.
"Daytime rugby is the answer for me.
"If you want people from the country to come and watch Otago and bring their kids, well, they’ll drive in for a 2.30pm game, because they know they can get back home at a reasonable hour.
"But they’re not going to drive in for a seven o’clock game."
• TOMORROW: Rugby writers offer their ideas.
