Warriors treat fans to home NRL win - Sports News - Fanatics - the world's biggest events

Warriors treat fans to home NRL win

By David Long 23/08/2009 03:35:42 PM Comments (0)

Coach David Furner's Canberra Raiders couldn't back up their giant-killing form of last week and suffered a 34-20 loss to the Warriors in Auckland on Sunday.

Canberra's defeat in a game that had no implications on the NRL top eight showed that the Raiders, who beat St George Illawarra last weekend, are still suffering from inconsistency.

"We've had a fairly good month when you talk about Broncos, tough game against the Bulldogs, beating St George and we saw this as a really good test of where we are," Furner said after his side lost six tries to four.

"We've challenged each week in last six weeks and this was a good challenge.

"We obviously didn't come up to that challenge and against a Warriors side that was desperate we missed a couple of chances.

"We spoke about their stars. They've got some good-sized men who can offload and I don't think we handled that quite well.

"We were beaten on the ground in both halves and any time we started to build some pressure we let it off through some of our own actions and that was the story of the game.

"It was a bit scrappy, but we definitely weren't good enough."

The Warriors had been on an horrendous home run before this game, losing three in a row at Mt Smart Stadium.

But their coach Ivan Clearly said this win will go down as one of the best games of what has proved to be a disappointing season.

"There was a bit of rust, we made some breaks, we probably weren't used to doing that," he said.

"We livened it up for them at training this week. Full credit to the players because they really trained well and had a good attitude for today's game.

"They wanted to make a statement at home and do it for the fans and themselves because regardless of how the year's gone they've worked really hard.

"They actually went out and played and enjoyed themselves."

Eight minutes into the game Lance Hohaia crossed and soon Aaron Heremia went in for the Warriors for his first NRL try.

Canberra's Josh McCrone ran through a gaping hole defence to score in the 31st minute and Jarrod Croker dived over three minutes later.

Simon Mannering scored the final try of the half, making the score 16-10 at the break for the Warriors.

Jerome Ropati won an aerial battle against Joel Duggan to catch a bomb and score the Warriors' try 14 minutes into the second half.

With 18 minutes left in the game the Warriors had it wrapped up when Lance Hohaia caught a Stacey Jones kick that went through the posts.

Joel Moon for the Warriors and the Raiders' Joel Thompson and Croker scored late tries for their teams, adding to entertaining, yet meaningless try-fest.

Brought to you by AAP AAP © 2024 AAP

0 Comments about this article

Post a comment about this article

Please sign in to leave a comment.
Becoming a member is free and easy, sign up here.

« All sports news