Watch every second of the 2026 Super Rugby Pacific season live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nAfter collapsing in the searing heat against the Brumbies last Saturday, the Force relinquished a three-point halftime lead to suffer a second-straight home defeat and slump to the bottom of the ladder.<\/p>\n
The victory extended the Blues’ winning streak over the Force to 14 matches and consigned Simon Cron’s Perth side to a sorry eighth successive Super Rugby Pacific defeat stretching back to round eight last year.<\/p>\n
The Force had snatched an unlikely 17-14 halftime lead when Tizzano – the competition’s top try scorer last season – forced his way over after the siren had sounded.<\/p>\n
Despite prop Harry Johnson-Holmes barging over for an 11th-minute try and three goals from the flawless boot of flyhalf Ben Donaldson, the Force had trailed after two first-half strikes from goalkicking No.10 Stephen Perofeta and prop Josh Fusitu’a.<\/p>\n
Alas, the Blues ran in four tries to two after the interval to follow up a hard-fought 26-23 loss to the Chiefs last week in their season opener.<\/p>\n
“It’s important. We had a tough one in round one,” Blues fullback Zarn Sullivan told Stan Sport.<\/p>\n
“So to come over here to tick off the first one, and then go down to Canberra next week and hopefully get another one.<\/p>\n
“You know, it’s not easy to come over to Perth. It’s lovely -the boys can clock off and get lost in paradise.<\/p>\n
“So it’s that mentality of being here for a job, get the job done, and let’s get back home.”<\/p>\n
Force captain Jeremy Williams felt first-half discipline killed his side.<\/p>\n
“We were pretty lucky to be up going into the second half with the amount of penalties we gave away,” he said.<\/p>\n
“And just where we were playing our rugby, they had all the ascendancy and the territory.<\/p>\n
“So, then, we didn’t really start fast at all coming out of the second half, which has been a struggle for us.<\/p>\n
“So plenty to work on, but there was also some good bits as well.”<\/p>\n
The Force’s campaign doesn’t get any easier, with a potentially season-defining stretch of away matches in New Zealand against Moana Pasifika, the Highlanders and Hurricanes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Western Force’s quest for a maiden finals berth seems forlorn after just two rounds of the Super…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,3925,760,85,48013,11229],"class_list":["post-494649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-blues","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-super-rugby-pacific","tag-western-force"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494649","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=494649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}