Ethan Strange has helped inspire the Australian Prime Minister’s XIII to a 28-10 win over Papua New Guinea in the annual clash in Port Moresby.<\/p>\n
Australia scored seven tries to two in a game that never reached any real heights in front of a boisterous crowd at the National Football Stadium.<\/p>\n
Trai Fuller, playing on the wing, scored a first-half treble and four tries for the match, while the locals also struggled to contain Jai Gray, Bradman Best and Tallis Duncan.<\/p>\n
Earlier, it was revealed the country’s incoming NRL side would be known as the Chiefs.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister James Marape announced the name had prevailed in a fan competition that attracted more than 20,000 submissions.<\/p>\n
The Chiefs are set to join the NRL for the 2028 season.<\/p>\n
When it came to Sunday’s match, one thing new Australian coach Kevin Walters will take away from the clash was the performance of Strange, the Dally M five-eighth of the year.<\/p>\n
Strange played most of the game at right centre and Walters now knows he can fill that role if required for the Kangaroos on the upcoming Ashes tour.<\/p>\n
Strange was not without the odd error, but the 21-year-old rising star did enough to suggest he is at least in the mix for Walters alongside specialist centres Kotoni Staggs, Gehamat Shibasaki and Best.<\/p>\n
Strange, Best, Keaon Koloamatangi and Mitchell Moses all looked to come through the game unscathed and will take their place on the plane to England.<\/p>\n
Australia opened their account after just eight minutes, Gray’s speed sending Fuller over untouched out wide.<\/p>\n
Six minutes later, Dudley Dotoi ran onto a great Harbour Bridge pass from Finlay Glare, evening things up to the delight of the sellout crowd.<\/p>\n
Duncan took advantage of several set restarts for the next try, slipping through some porous defence to touch down before he slipped a silky pass to Fuller to grab his double.<\/p>\n
Fuller had a hat-trick inside 30 minutes after Gray again burnt the Kumuls for speed as Australia led 16-4 at the interval.<\/p>\n
It took 18 minutes for either side to trouble the scorer in the second term before an early kick to the back of the in-goal from Jayden Campbell allowed Best to touch down.<\/p>\n
Less than two minutes later, Parramatta maestro Moses, who only entered the game at half-time, busted the line on halfway and sent Tyran Wishart over.<\/p>\n
Tries followed to Fuller and PNG front rower Epel Kapinias to cap another win for Australia.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ethan Strange has helped inspire the Australian Prime Minister’s XIII to a 28-10 win over Papua New Guinea…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,5386,23995,761,762,158,27284,15560,128287,159,85],"class_list":["post-207487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-chiefs","tag-jye-gray","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-papua-new-guinea","tag-png","tag-prime-ministers-xi","tag-rugby-league","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}