TOKYO – Spears Tokyo Bay will battle Kobe Steelers for the Japan Rugby League One championship after holding off Saitama Wild Knights 26-24 in a grueling semifinal clash on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The Wild Knights trailed 26-12 before taking the contest down to the wire with two late tries in the wake of Merwe Olivier’s 77th-minute yellow card at Prince Chichibu Memorial Rugby Ground.<\/p>\n
But missed conversions proved costly for Saitama, with Koki Takeyama off-target following Yusaku Kihara’s 78th-minute effort, and Takaya Saito having his kick spectacularly charged down by Spears speedster Halatoa Vailea following replacement winger Maurice Marks’s five-pointer midway through the second half.<\/p>\n
Spears led 10-7 at the break after Vailea came off the bench to score a converted try late in the opening half as the Wild Knights played with 14 men following Dylan Riley’s yellow card.<\/p>\n
Head coach Frans Ludeke’s team opened a 14-point margin on back-to-back penalties late in the second half before the Wild Knights mounted their comeback.<\/p>\n
Saito dotted down and added a drop-goal conversion in the final minute before Spears sent their subsequent kickoff over the dead-ball line, giving the Wild Knights one last roll of the dice with a scrum restart from halfway.<\/p>\n
With Atsushi Kanazawa’s men attacking wide after the siren, Marks was tackled into touch, sparking celebrations from Tokyo Bay’s “Orange Army” fan contingent.<\/p>\n
“We knew it was going to be tough,” Ludeke said. “We knew also that it was going to go down to the wire, the last play in the last minute.”<\/p>\n
After losing last year’s final to Brave Lupus Tokyo, Spears will have the chance to send off departing stalwarts Bernard Foley and Pieter “Lappies” Labuschagne as champions in a week’s time.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got an opportunity next weekend and we want to make the most of that,” Ludeke said. “We’ve learned a lot from last year, so this week is all about us just recovering, getting the boys ready, so we can go do battle again next week.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TOKYO – Spears Tokyo Bay will battle Kobe Steelers for the Japan Rugby League One championship after holding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-706109","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\/706109","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=706109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}