{"id":555392,"date":"2026-08-02T00:33:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T00:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/555392\/"},"modified":"2026-08-02T00:33:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T00:33:12","slug":"npc-mounga-scores-match-winning-try-for-canterbury-against-auckland-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/555392\/","title":{"rendered":"NPC: Mo’unga scores match-winning try for Canterbury against Auckland"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 last 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

TVNZ will broadcast all NPC matches live and free on TVNZ+<\/a>, with three games broadcast on TVNZ 1 \u2013 a flagship Saturday primetime match at 7pm, alongside Saturdays and Sundays at 2pm.<\/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

rnz.co.nz<\/a><\/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":555393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[6166,7705,898,111,139,69,620,6031,213,272754,5537],"class_list":["post-555392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-anthropic","tag-claude","tag-meta","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-openai","tag-perplexity","tag-sports","tag-x-ai","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555392","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=555392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}