Cook Islands have booked the last spot at next year’s Rugby League World Cup, after Warriors star Marata Niukore led them to a 58-6 thumping of South Africa.<\/p>\n
Niukore scored a double in Sunday’s big win at Western Sydney Stadium, with the Pacific nation proving too skilful for the Rhinos.<\/p>\n
Sporting a side with no NRL players and only a few State Cup members, South Africa led 6-4 early and did well to stay in the contest.<\/p>\n
But when prop Davvy Moale crashed through three defenders to make it 10-6, South Africa’s hopes of returning to the World Cup for the first time since 2000 quickly evaporated.<\/p>\n
Esan Marsters and Niukore both scored within five minutes of each other just before half-time.<\/p>\n
And in the second half, it was a demolition job.<\/p>\n
Five-eighth Cassius Cowley scored two tries and Niukore finished off his double when he ran another great line to go in.<\/p>\n
Brendan Piakura produced the try of the game when he split two defenders on halfway and stepped South Africa’s fullback to score.<\/p>\n
Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n
Cronulla star KL Iro also rounded out a 60-metre effort when Rua Ngatikaura threw an offload and Cassius Cowley went into space.<\/p>\n
And with that, Cook Islands were celebrating their fourth World Cup appearance.<\/p>\n
Australia and New Zealand will kick off the five-week tournament in Sydney on October 15, before it culminates in a final at Lang Park in mid-November.<\/p>\n
The 10-team competition will split sides between three groups in the preliminary stage.<\/p>\n
Australia and New Zealand will be in a four-team Group A, with the top two to qualify for the semi-finals.<\/p>\n
The teams across Groups B and C will play against the three sides in the opposing group, and effectively form one six-team ladder with the top two to progress.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cook Islands have booked the last spot at next year’s Rugby League World Cup, after Warriors star Marata…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,19307,32602,760,159,139707,1183,588,85,143685,8935],"class_list":["post-272656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cook-islands","tag-qualification","tag-rugby","tag-rugby-league","tag-rugby-league-world-cup","tag-south-africa","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-western-sydney-stadium","tag-win"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272656","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=272656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}