Having finally fulfilled a long-held desire to represent New Zealand, Ponga’s night was going sweetly – he scored two tries that included one trademark run from deep and elusive step that left Walsh clutching at air – but it ended on a bitter note. <\/p>\n
For one thing, Australia swiped victory from the grasp of Stacey Jones’ team. For another, Ponga’s future participation in the World Cup is now in serious doubt.<\/p>\n
Speaking after the game, Jones admitted that the Newcastle Knights man would now have medical checks after playing on for a quarter of the contest with an injury sustained in a tackle with Cameron Munster.<\/p>\n
“It’s a possible fracture of the arm, but he’s going to go for scans and we’re not going to make a call on him right now where he’s at,” said Jones.<\/p>\n
“He had a pretty good game.<\/p>\n
“I think he played on for 20 minutes, he toughed it out. It’s a tough one. They scored a try and that’s when we were told what it possibly was and that he would have to come off.<\/p>\n
“He couldn’t catch the ball or anything like that. He was in a lot of discomfort.”<\/p>\n
Should Ponga be ruled out it would be a huge blow to New Zealand’s hopes of winning a second World Cup, 18 years on from their first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having finally fulfilled a long-held desire to represent New Zealand, Ponga’s night was going sweetly – he scored…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-631675","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\/631675","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=631675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}