Melbourne have locked down a top-two ladder position with two rounds to play after holding out Canterbury in their blockbuster NRL showdown.<\/p>\n
Following a golden-point victory by Canberra over Penrith that put the Raiders in prime position to claim the minor premiership earlier on Friday night, the Storm were forced to work hard for a 20-14 win over a much-improved Bulldogs outfit.<\/p>\n
The match also almost went to golden point when Canterbury looked to have scored with just over a minute remaining off a Matt Burton bomb, which would have locked up the match with a successful conversion.<\/p>\n
But the bunker ruled a knock-on by skipper Stephen Crichton.<\/p>\n
The AAMI Park victory put Melbourne four points clear of third-placed Canterbury, but they have a far superior points differential.<\/p>\n
Jacob Kiraz of the Bulldogs drops the ball over the try-line\u00a0Graham Denholm\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Storm took a 12-0 lead into halftime but hooker Bailey Hayward burrowed over from dummy-half to put his team on the scoreboard in the 43rd minute.<\/p>\n
Melbourne then lost prop Tui Kamikamica to a head knock and skipper Harry Grant to the sin bin for a no-arms shot on Harry Hayes.<\/p>\n
It looked like the visitors would take advantage immediately but Ryan Papenhuyzen managed to dislodge the ball from Jacob Kiraz as he dived over the tryline.<\/p>\n
Instead it was the Storm pushing the margin out to 18-6 when Jonah Pezet put through a pin-point crossfield kick into the in-goal for Xavier Coates to score.<\/p>\n
Canterbury, who last week were humbled 32-12 by the Sydney Roosters, showed their fighting spirit with halfback Lachlan Galvin mixing up the attack with a fresh running game.<\/p>\n
Hayes looked certain to score after he made a 35 metre dash but was unsupported and lost the ball thanks to a heavy tackle from Coates, with the Bulldogs second-rower injuring his knee.<\/p>\n
They were finally rewarded in the 69th minute with a Kiraz try before Crichton caused some nervous moments for the home side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melbourne have locked down a top-two ladder position with two rounds to play after holding out Canterbury in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-87523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87523","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=87523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}