Canterbury have waltzed into the NPC semifinals with a 62-26 victory over Waikato in Christchurch.<\/p>\n
The Cantabrians made it six wins in a row after they came firing out of the blocks, scoring five unanswered tries in the first 26 minutes.<\/p>\n
Hooker Brodie McAlister scored two of those, and made it a hat-trick just before halftime, emulating Taranaki and fellow All Black hooker Bradley Slater, who got three for Taranaki in their 50-31 win over North Harbour on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Waikato had got on the board with a try to Mason Tuapea in the 28th minute but Dom Gardiner scored shortly after and McAlister’s third it made it 43-7 at halftime.<\/p>\n
The Mooloos had to score first in the second half if they were to have any chance and to their credit they scored two, narrowing the gap to 43-21, but Canterbury found their rhythm again in the final quarter and ran in three more tries before Waisake Salabiau scored a late consolation one for Waikato.<\/p>\n
McAlister deferred credit for his three tries to his fellow forwards, telling Sky Sport he was just finishing off their good work.<\/p>\n
“The set piece is a real weapon of ours.”<\/p>\n
Waikato captain Mitch Jacobson rued the Canterbury dominance in the first half.<\/p>\n
“I’m proud of the boys for their second half effort but gee we let ourselves down in the first half.”<\/p>\n
Canterbury will face Taranaki in their semifinal next weekend, while Otago will play Northland. Otago beat Hawke’s Bay 50-14 yesterday while Northland beat Tasman 26-21 on Friday night.<\/p>\n
See how the action unfolded below:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canterbury have waltzed into the NPC semifinals with a 62-26 victory over Waikato in Christchurch. The Cantabrians made…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-627031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627031","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=627031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}