Richie Mo’unga has scored the winning try for Canterbury in his first NPC match since 2020, with the defending champions beating Auckland 38-31.<\/p>\n
Mo’unga, who has spent the last three years playing in Japan, came on as a replacement in the second half on Saturday night, and while he had a few awkward moments, he turned on the class to split the Auckland defence in the 78th minute, when the scores were deadlocked.<\/p>\n
The first half was helter-skelter, with Canterbury starting off where they left off last season, with early dominance at the breakdown seeing them score two tries in the first 11 minutes.<\/p>\n
But Auckland stormed back when the red-and-blacks made a couple of errors, leaving a hole in their lineout for Sam Hainsworth-Fa’aofo to score and then gifting an intercept to Xavier Tito-Harris.<\/p>\n
Canterbury then scored two more tries, but Auckland claimed one back to trail 26-21 at halftime.<\/p>\n
There was a big cheer when Mo’unga took the field but he looked a bit rusty early, knocking forward a ball that bounced just in front of him and then missing a conversion he normally would have nailed.<\/p>\n
Auckland had taken the lead for the first time in the 60th minute, but Canterbury hit back seven minutes later.<\/p>\n
It was 31-all with 12 minutes to go and stayed that way, until Canterbury’s forwards charged towards the Auckland line from a lineout after winning a penalty and Mo’unga got his hands on the ball playing halfback, fooling the defence with a dummy and scoring by the posts. He then converted it.<\/p>\n
In earlier games today, Otago beat Southland 41-14, and Taranaki beat Counties Manukau 20 points to five.<\/p>\n
On Friday night, Tasman pipped North Harbour 31-29 in Nelson, while Waikato opened the season with a 38-26 win over Bay of Plenty on Thursday.<\/p>\n
See how tonight’s game unfolded here:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richie Mo’unga has scored the winning try for Canterbury in his first NPC match since 2020, with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":554492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-554540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554540","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=554540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}