Oneal Rongo was a stand-out for Northland on the way to their fourth-place finish at the Auckland 7s tournament held at Harvey Wright field in Northcote. Photo / Tania Whyte
Oneal Rongo was a stand-out for Northland on the way to their fourth-place finish at the Auckland 7s tournament held at Harvey Wright field in Northcote. Photo / Tania Whyte
Northland's sevens team cantered to fourth overall at the annual Auckland 7s tournament, not a bad result given the team has been together for just one week.
Now with their sights set on a provincial sevens competition in Cambridge this weekend, the recent result bodes well for Northland as theywork toward booking a spot at next year's national sevens event in Rotorua.
"We're doing some bloody good things with the younger fullas, the boys are stepping up which is good [and] they're just going to get better and better with the experience," coach Peter Nock said.
Adding that Northland were "down to nine players" at the Auckland 7s last year, Nock said management had to "ring around some local Northland boys down there because we were running short on players".
With a fresh mix of youth in this year's team, however, Northland faired much better at the weekend.
"This year we brought down 14 players and only in our last game we had one unavailable, it was really good - that's what a bit of youth does," Nock said.
Kicking the 2015 Auckland 7s tournament off with a 14-10 win over Bay of Plenty, Northland then lost 19-14 to Waikato before ending day one on a high with a breezy 26-12 win over Northcote to win their pool and advance to the quarter-finals.
Coming up against North Harbour yesterday, Northland managed to notch up a 19-15 win to progress to the semifinals where they faced Counties Manakau. Losing their semifinal match by the slimmest of margins, 19-17, Northland narrowly missed out on a top three finish, succumbing to Waikato in a playoff for 3rd/4th by the same score.
Noting that captain Issac O'Grady put on a gutsy two days of sevens, Nock highlighted the performances of Oneal Rongo and Tyler Landsdowne were on song as well.
Travelling to Cambridge this weekend for a provincial tournament, Northland were supposed to get a game under their belts against North Harbour at Hikurangi in two weekends' time.
However, North Harbour has pulled out from this match, possibly due to the fact they are under-performing after losing to a Northcote Men's A team at the Auckland 7s tourney.
Locking in a friendly match against Counties Manakau instead, Nock said they were disheartened to have North Harbour pull out at the last minute.
"We organised a hit-out with them two months ago to play the weekend after the Cambridge tournament... they've just told us today that it's too far for them to travel to Hikurangi.
"We just told them to never mind. Some of our boys have to travel two-and-a-half hours juts to get to Wellsford but they don't understand that."
