Canterbury have surged into the NPC final with a tense 38-28 victory over Taranaki at Te Kaha Stadium in Christchurch.<\/p>\n
The red and blacks have been the competition frontrunners this season, topping the regular season with eight wins from their 10 games before trouncing Waikato 62-26 in their quarterfinal last weekend.<\/p>\n
They will play Northland in the final in Christchurch on Labour Day.<\/p>\n
Both sides were boosted with gifts from All Blacks coach Dave Rennie, who released Josh Jacomb and Jamie Hannah early from their duties so they could play in the semifinal. They flew back during the Bledisloe Cup test, with Jacomb starting at first-five-eighth for Taranaki and Hannah coming off the bench for Canterbury.<\/p>\n
It was even midway through the first half at 7-7, but the Canterbury forwards stepped up another gear in the second quarter, as the team ran in three more tries to go with flanker Corey Kellow’s earlier effort to give them a 26-7 lead at halftime. Taranaki never shirked but gave away too many penalties under the Canterbury pressure.<\/p>\n
Canterbury went further ahead in the second half when Isaac Hutchinson motored over for a try, but then Taranaki struck back, firstly through Meihana Grindlay, and then through Kaylum Boshier.<\/p>\n
Hutchinson eased the pressure on Canterbury a little bit with his second try but then Grindlay’s second try set up a tense 13 minutes, but Taranaki just couldn’t get another try.<\/p>\n
See how the game unfolded below:<\/p>\n
Embedded content removed for printing<\/p>\n
Canterbury: 1. Finlay Brewis, 2. Brodie McAlister (c), 3. Seb Calder, 4. Tahlor Cahill, 5. Sam Darry, 6. Xavier Treacy, 7. Corey Kellow, 8. Dom Gardiner, 9. Louie Chapman, 10. Andrew Knewstubb, 11. Kurtis MacDonald, 12. Jone Rova, 13. Dallas McLeod, 14. Isaac Hutchinson, 15. Johnny McNicholl<\/p>\n
Reserves: 16. Manumaua Letiu, 17. Lewis Ponini, 18. Gus Brown, 19. Max Fale, 20. Torian Barnes, 21. Tyson Belworthy, 22. Macklan Robertson, 23. James Cameron<\/p>\n
Taranaki: 1. Jared Proffit, 2. Bradley Slater (cc), 3. Reuben O’Neill, 4. Jesse Parete, 5. Fiti Sa, 6. Josefa Namosimalua, 7. Michael Loft, 8. Kaylum Boshier (cc), 9. Adam Lennox, 10. Sam Clarke, 11. Kini Naholo, 12. Seta Tamanivalu, 13. Meihana Grindlay, 14. Vereniki Tikoisolomone, 15. Jacob Ratumaitavuki-Kneepkens<\/p>\n
Reserves: 16. JJ Pokai, 17. Perry Lawrence, 18. Keightley Watson, 19. Jayden Sa, 20. Arese Poliko, 21. Logan Crowley, 22. Jamie Viljoen, 23. Haki Wiseman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canterbury have surged into the NPC final with a tense 38-28 victory over Taranaki at Te Kaha Stadium…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634447,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-634446","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\/634446","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=634446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}