Center Charlie Ngatai scored two first-half tries to lift the Waikato Chiefs to a 35-27 win over the Western Force and to a temporary position atop the table in Super Rugby yesterday.
Ngatai’s double helped the Chiefs to a 23-8 halftime lead, which they extended to 30-8 with a try to winger Tim Nanai-Williams before the Force mounted a stirring comeback with three tries.
The Chiefs’ fourth straight win, achieved with a bonus point from a contentious penalty try, lifted them to the top of the New Zealand conference and the overall table.
The Hurricanes led the tournament by a point from the Chiefs after suffering their first loss of the season last weekend at the hands of defending champions the New South Wales Waratahs.
The Chiefs’ win lifted them to 37 points, four ahead of the Wellington-based Hurricanes, who can reclaim the lead with a win over the struggling Queensland Reds in Brisbane tomorrow in the last match of the 11th round.
The Chiefs seized control of Friday’s match in an outstanding first half in which their forwards splintered the Force defense and created opportunities for two quick tries by Ngatai.
His first in the 19th minute was the best of the match. He wriggled through a tackle and passed infield to All Blacks lock Brodie Retallick, who cracked the defense. Retallick stepped through a tackle and passed to scrumhalf Brad Webber, who quickly fed Ngatai for a try between the posts.
The Force played the last 50 minutes of the match with 14 men after scrumhalf Ian Prior was shown a red card for a dangerous tackle on Nanai-Williams. They still showed exceptional character to surge back into the match with second-half tries to Luke Morahan, Matt Hodgson and Heath Tessman.
The Chiefs were able to stave off their rally with Nanai-Williams’ brilliant solo try in the 66th minute — he shrugged off four tackles to score. The 46th-minute penalty try from a disintegrating scrum was also decisive: The Chiefs were still 10m from the line when the try was awarded and there seemed to be considerable doubt that a try was imminent without the penalty.
At Canberra Stadium, David Pocock scored a hat-trick of tries as the ACT Brumbies snapped a two-match losing streak to beat the Otago Highlanders 31-18, reviving their stuttering campaign.
The Brumbies cemented their position at the head of the Australian conference standings with a bonus-point win.
Additional reporting by Reuters
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier