Napier City Rovers

Napier sits on the Hawke's Bay coast, and its senior football has run through one club since 6 February 1973, when Napier Rovers AFC and Napier City AFC stopped competing for the same players and merged. The result took the name of the city and the nickname The Blues.

What the club is known for nationally is the Chatham Cup, New Zealand's knockout competition, and the record there runs both ways. The first of five wins came in 1985 — the same year Bluewater Stadium opened out at Tamatea, on Clyde Jeffery Drive. Then 1993, then 2000, when Central United found no answer in a 4-1 final.

The losses are part of the same story. Central United took their revenge in the 1997 final, 3-2. Wairarapa United won 1-2 in 2011, a game in which Fergus Neil scored. Eastern Suburbs beat Napier in the 2015 final. Four defeats against five wins over three and a half decades: this is a club that keeps arriving in May and June with something to play for, and does not always leave with it.

The fifth cup came in 2019, 3-2 against Melville United — the club's first in 17 years and the one that closed the gap after the near-misses.

Week to week, the football is a division below the top. Napier City Rovers compete in the National League-Central, the second tier, and have never won the national championship. The Central League has been kinder, though the cup remains what people outside Hawke's Bay know them for.

Bluewater Stadium holds 5,000.