Australia’s rugby sevens teams have both lost finals to New Zealand in the season-opening world series event in Dubai.<\/p>\n
The Australian women’s team was defeated for the first time in Dubai after five consecutive tournament triumphs, outplayed 29-14 in the final by the reigning world series champions.<\/p>\n
New Zealand proved too strong for the Australian men’s team, winning 26-22 in their final.<\/p>\n
In the women’s tournament decider, New Zealand’s Jorja Miller scored two tries in a player-of-the-final performance to eclipse her star Australian counterpart Maddison Levi.<\/p>\n
Levi, who had scored seven tries over the weekend going into the final, did not get a look-in as New Zealand leapt out to a 17-0 half-time lead.<\/p>\n
Tries from Stacey Waaka, Kelsey Teneti and Risi Pouri-Lane added to Miller’s double, with two second-half scores from Heidi Dennis proving the only consolation for Australia.<\/p>\n
The Australian men, who had earlier beaten France 14-0 in the semifinals, began positively against New Zealand with Maurice Longbottom going over for the first try.<\/p>\n
But Longbottom injured himself while scoring and had to leave the field, handing the initiative to New Zealand, who grabbed a 12-5 half-time lead through tries from Dylan Collier and Akuila Rokolisoa.<\/p>\n
New Zealand maintained its command in the second half, with late Australian tries helping to limit the winning margin to four points.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia’s rugby sevens teams have both lost finals to New Zealand in the season-opening world series event in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,5951,1736,760,31153,2633,85],"class_list":["post-319268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-dubai","tag-new-zealand","tag-rugby","tag-rugby-sevens","tag-rugby-union","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319268","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=319268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}