Rob Hawkins scored five second-half tries as England’s wheelchair rugby league side began their tour of Australia with an 86-10 victory over New South Wales in Sydney.<\/p>\n
Hawkins, the reigning international wheelchair player of the year, is seeking to complete a memorable 2025 with an Ashes series victory after helping his club Halifax Panthers win the treble of Challenge Cup, League Leaders’ Shield and Grand Final.<\/p>\n
England scored 15 tries as head coach Tom Coyd gave all 10 of his squad half a game each – with five playing the first half, and the other five the second.<\/p>\n
Hawkins’ Halifax club-mate Jack Brown scored three of England’s first four tries, with debutant Luis Domingos, captain Lewis King and veteran Wayne Boardman also crossing before the break. Boardman added five goals.<\/p>\n
Finlay O’Neill, another Halifax treble winner, came on for his debut in the second half, when Leeds pivot Nathan Collins scored 20 points from a try and eight goals, while Wheels of Steel winner Joe Coyd touched down once and Seb Bechara twice.<\/p>\n
“Obviously we’ve been battling jetlag and fatigue a little bit this week after the flight, but that was why the game against New South Wales was so important,” Tom Coyd said.<\/p>\n
“It’s been almost a year since we last played as an England team, with the Test against France last November, so we needed to get out on the pitch together.<\/p>\n
“It was great to see Finlay O’Neill and Luis Domingos in action in England jerseys for the first time, and I think we’ll wake up on Saturday morning really knowing that we’ve arrived in Australia.”<\/p>\n
England face Queensland on the Sunshine Coast next Monday before two Tests against Australia on 30 October and 2 November on the Gold Coast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rob Hawkins scored five second-half tries as England’s wheelchair rugby league side began their tour of Australia with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-222771","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}