Northland has held on to the Ranfurly Shield, beating Tasman 20-10 in Whangarei in a heated NPC clash.<\/p>\n
Taniwha captain Rivez Reihana scored a crucial late try to secure a 10-point advantage, with under five minutes of game-time remaining.<\/p>\n
The evenly contested match was tied 10-all at halftime, with the tension boiling over into aggression at times between the rival players.<\/p>\n
The ecstatic Northland captain said he was savouring every moment and “soaking it in”.<\/p>\n
The players would tour the Log o’ Wood to “every corner of Northland” in the upcoming weeks.<\/p>\n
“It’s indescribable at the moment,” Reihana told SkySport.<\/p>\n
Northland have posted four wins from five games in a successful campaign, and are second on the table behind leaders Hawke’s Bay.<\/p>\n
“It’s a special taonga, and it’s been a long time that it’s been up north, so I’m just glad we’ve got if for another week.”<\/p>\n
The next Shield challenge will be a clash against Waikato on September 12 in round 7.<\/p>\n
Earlier in NPC rugby action, Counties Manukau recorded their first win of the season to beat winless Wellington 46-35.<\/p>\n
Follow all the action in our live blog below:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Northland has held on to the Ranfurly Shield, beating Tasman 20-10 in Whangarei in a heated NPC clash.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-584814","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\/584814","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=584814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}