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Hours away from taking on the Cronulla Sharks<\/a> in the second week of the 2025 NRL Finals<\/a> series, the Canberra Raiders<\/a> have suffered a massive blow with a star player being ruled out of the contest.<\/p>\n In a statement issued on Saturday morning by the club, five-eighth Ethan Strange<\/a> has been ruled out of the clash due to illness.<\/p>\n Utility Simi Sasagi<\/a> has been named to take his spot in the halves alongside Jamal Fogarty<\/a>, while Matty Nicholson<\/a> will enter the line-up and come off the interchange bench.<\/p>\n One of the best players for the Raiders this season, Strange has scored six tries in his past four matches and provided a lethal combination with Fogarty, which saw them claim the Minor Premiership.<\/p>\n Providing 12 try assists and eight line-break assists this season, his absence will need to see the likes of Kaeo Weekes<\/a> stand up and deliver if the Green Machine are any hope of progressing through to the Preliminary Final next week against the Melbourne Storm<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hours away from taking on the Cronulla Sharks in the second week of the 2025 NRL…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-32605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}