The Kiwis could be without fullback Kalyn Ponga for the rest of the Rugby League World Cup after he suffered an injury in the opening game in Sydney.<\/p>\n
He scored two of the Kiwi’s three tries and then bravely battled on for 20 minutes with the suspected fracture, before being forced to leave the field late in the game.<\/p>\n
“Yeh he’s a tough bugger,” Kiwis captain James Fisher-Harris said afterwards. “Obviously a lot of pride in the black and white jersey and he didn’t want to let his team mates down.”<\/p>\n
Ponga was playing his first game for New Zealand after a change in the international eligibility rules made him available for selection for the World Cup.<\/p>\n
He was one of the NRL’s top players this season helping Newcastle to the grand final.<\/p>\n
“He did an outstanding job, a freakish player but he’s also one of those tough players and feeling for him right now but fingers crossed,” Fisher-Harris said.<\/p>\n
The Kiwis next game is against Cook Islands on October 25, while the final is four weeks away.<\/p>\n
New Zealand’s first up loss to Australia means if they make the semi-finals they are likely to play the top team from the other side of the draw, Samoa or England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Kiwis could be without fullback Kalyn Ponga for the rest of the Rugby League World Cup after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-631783","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\/631783","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=631783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}