The first column of this table records the number of occasions on which teams have won the Ranfurly Shield from 1904 to 2014. The second column records the number of times they have then defended the shield either by recording wins or draws. The dominance of the big city unions is obvious. By far the highest number of defences was by Auckland between 1985 and 1993, when they defended the shield a remarkable 61 times. However, there have been notable tenures by some of the smaller unions, such as Hawke’s Bay in 1922–27 and again in 1966–69, Taranaki in 1957–59 and 1963–65, and Southland in 1938–47 and 2009–10.