Australia’s rugby women have suffered an unaccustomed hammering in the final of the Singapore Sevens, crushed 36-7 in the latest instalment of their trans-Tasman rivalry with the Jorja Miller-inspired New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Suffocated by their sheer in-your-face physicality of the Black Ferns, not even the Aussies’ star turn Maddison Levi, who’d scored a hat-trick in their 35-10 win over Canada in the semis earlier on Sunday, could get a look in.<\/p>\n
Instead, it was New Zealand’s own 21-year-old phenomenon Miller who delivered a masterclass as she’d done all tournament, scoring two tries and making several other key interventions in the tackle and breakdown as the Kiwis ran in six tries, including five in a first-half blitz.<\/p>\n
The thrashing was hardly the way the Tim Walsh-coached team would have wanted to go into the defence of their Perth Sevens title back home next weekend.<\/p>\n
This was the third time Australia and New Zealand had met in a final this season, with the Aussies hopeful of downing the reigning champions again after winning their Cape Town showdown in December.<\/p>\n
But by the time Australia had come out for the second half, they were 24-0 down and almost out, with Miller having already pounced on a first-half restart error to score a superb solo try before delivering another tour de force to skip over for her second two minutes later.<\/p>\n
With the speedy Jazmin Felix-Hotham also grabbing a brace of tries and Mhina Paul and Katelyn Vahaakolo racing over as well, Australia were only able to break through the shackles once belatedly with the consolation second-half score from Bienne Terita.<\/p>\n
New Zealand’s Risaleaana Pouri-Lane (C) battles against Australia’s Bienne Terita (L)\u00a0Roslan RAHMAN \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
It was a grievous disappointment after they’d looked so impressive in their semi-final against Canada with tries from Heidi Dennis and Teagan Levi as well as the treble from Levi’s big sister.<\/p>\n
In the men’s event, Australia had to settle for fifth place after failing to make the semi-finals, ending up with encouraging wins over Great Britain 26-19 and 26-12 against Spain.<\/p>\n
Henry Hutchison completed his record-breaking weekend when he became the first Australian to play in 62 world series tournaments by scoring a try in both matches, while Aden Ekanayake scored in four of their five matches over the weekend.<\/p>\n
The men’s title went to Fiji, who won the battle of the last two Olympic champions 21-12 against France, the gold medallists from Paris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia’s rugby women have suffered an unaccustomed hammering in the final of the Singapore Sevens, crushed 36-7 in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-452539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452539","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=452539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}