Papua New Guinea made the Kiwi Ferns work, before they eased clear 40-12 on a soggy Gold Coast and make it three wins from three Rugby League World Cup pool games.<\/p>\n
New Zealand will be top qualifiers from Group B for next weekend’s semi-finals, where they face Samoa in Newcastle.<\/p>\n
While the Ferns romped to a 92-0 win over France in Christchurch last week, their two other matches have been decent contests, including their opening 18-12 defeat of group runners-up Fiji, who will face Australia in the other semi.<\/p>\n
PNG were particularly difficult to break down in the first half, with a try to Kaiyah Atai on the stroke of the interval inching New Zealand to a 14-12 advantage.<\/p>\n
Play opened up in the second half, with the Kiwis adding five more tries to their overall tally of eight, while keeping their tiring opponents scoreless.<\/p>\n
They started the second spell on the best possible note, when front-rower Otesa Pule scored a runaway 70m solo try almost from the restart.<\/p>\n
Backs Mackenzie Wiki and the impressive Abigail Roache both completed doubles after the break, as their team unearthed greater cohesion and reduced the error count.<\/p>\n
Duel international Stacey Waaka and Wiki bagged tries early in the match, but both were cancelled out by PNG, who responded with converted tries to Tia Molo and Elsie Albert.<\/p>\n
Captain and halfback Raecene McGregor said her team would need to be better in the knockout phase.<\/p>\n
“Obviously, I’m proud that we were really resilient and got through it in the end,” she told Sky Sport.<\/p>\n
“There were a couple of errors in that first half and even in the second half – we need to be better, especially coming into the semis.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Papua New Guinea made the Kiwi Ferns work, before they eased clear 40-12 on a soggy Gold Coast…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646906,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-646905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646905","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=646905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}