Nine All Blacks players are heading home early from Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series, with a squad of 36 heading to the US for the fourth and final test.<\/p>\n
Three players have been ruled out after receiving injuries in Sunday morning’s 29-24 defeat to the Springboks in the third test in Soweto.<\/p>\n
Captain and No.8 Ardie Savea has a dislocated shoulder which he suffered in the first half of the match after scoring the All Blacks first two tries.<\/p>\n
Midfielder Quinn Tupaea has a knee injury, also suffered during the third test loss, while openside Luke Jacobson, who took over as captain after Savea left the field, has injured a tendon in his elbow, which will require further investigation on return to New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Return to play timeframes for these players are yet to be determined.<\/p>\n
Together with the injured trio an additional six players will return home ahead of the fourth test in Baltimore, with first-five Josh Jacomb, props Siale Lauaki, Saula Ma’u and Ofa Tu’ungafasi, halfback Cortez Ratima (knee injury) and hooker Bradley Slater.<\/p>\n
The rest of the squad travelled to the US last night on a charter flight they shared with the Springboks, who lead the four test series 2-1.<\/p>\n
The squad for the Baltimore test, which kicks off at 9am Sunday morning (NZT) is as follows:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nine All Blacks players are heading home early from Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series, with a squad of 36…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-591975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591975","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=591975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}