League: Coach pumped over 'rampant' Unicorns

Hawke's Bay men's rugby league coach Allan Mason is "pumped."
Mason says the code in this region has probably never been in such good heart.
His side were the top New Zealand-based team at the Aotearoa Maori rugby league tournament.
The Unicorns beat the likes of Auckland, Waikato and Taranaki on their way to the Grand Final, where their giant-killing run was finally halted 32-22 by New South Wales Maori.
"We had a number of firsts over the weekend," Mason said.
"The first was that we'd never, ever been in a final at the Maori national tournament and out of that we had six players named in the Aotearoa Maori tournament team - Troy Savage, Hohepa Cahill, Israel Sciascia, Brendon Henerson, Jarrod Trott and Karl Johnson. "Plus, we were the only province that took four teams. We had teams in both the men's first and second divisions and women's teams and our youth team."
That's not forgetting regular captain Kererua Savage, who was unavailable for the first day of the tournament because of Pacific Cup duty with the Maori side, which were beaten in their own Grand Final by the Cook Islands.
With so many NRL scouts attending the tournament expectations were high that one or two Unicorn players would attract attention. That one or looks like it could become several more if the inquiries fielded by team manager John Young are anything to go by.
He says legendary Australian and Queensland prop Arthur Beetson, now head scout with the Sydney Roosters, is interested in signing both Troy Savage and Cahill as quickly as possible, while other clubs have expressed interest in Kererua Savage and Israel and Damon Sciascia.
With many of the teams littered with NRL reserve graders, Mason and Young agree that the performance of their team against players of that calibre, shows the enormous strides that rugby league has made in Hawke's Bay in a relatively short period.
The pair say that having beaten Auckland 24-16, Waikato 28-16, Taranaki 42-0 and Northland's Ngati Kahu 21-16, Hawke's Bay can rightly consider themselves the best province in New Zealand.