North Zone eyes spot in regional final

A good victory to the Northland North Zone under-14 team has them eyeing a place in the Blues regional final in two weeks time after they comfortably dispatched Auckland West 37-17.
Right from the kick-off on Saturday at Waipu, the North Zone applied pressure and didn't take long before that pressure was turned into points.
Sam Munro crossed the tryline at the end of a good forward drive with only a few minutes gone and Northland were soon back down in Auckland West's quarter. The second try came after quick ball from a ruck with halfback Jevon Halvorson running from the base to score the second try with just seven minutes on the clock.
The game carried on with captain Hamish Pomare ensuring his team kept pressure on Auckland.
They scored seven tries in total with only one conversion made in tough windy conditions. Other try scorers were Raniera Campbell, Cody Kemp Bruce, Hamish Pomare, Shelford Murray and George John Westerlund.
Northland North Zone coaches Peter Nock and Robert Rush were pleased they had opened up a good lead at halftime, allowing them to give all their substitutes a run.
Auckland West scored a couple of tries in the second spell but the North Zone team still won the second half, which was a testament to their work ethic.
The team is looking forward to playing Auckland East on Saturday and if they win that they will be playing in the final of the inaugural Blues U14 competition.
Nick Shepherd from Blues spoke after the game and mentioned that the new competition was about getting more boys playing at a representative level.
In the early match at Waipu, the Northland South Zone team played well in patches but struggled to finish off some of their attacking moves against Auckland South, eventually going down 33-12.
In other Northland representative fixtures, the under-20 side got up over Counties-Manukau to earn a nail-biting 13-12 victory at Kamo. The under-18 team lost 3-26 to Waikato at Hamilton, while the under-18 development side, the Vikings, lost 3-29 to North Harbour at Albany and the under-16s beat Thames Valley 58-10 before losing to Bay of Plenty 14-22.
The Northland team had a good start to their Roller Mills competition beating Counties Manukau 31-10 at Cambridge on Sunday.
The team also had another moral victory over the tournament organisers before the Counties match, when they performed the haka, in the face of a ban by tournament organisers. The Northland management said they would be performing the haka as a protest and the organisers relented to allow the haka to be performed for the rest of the tournament.
The team play Auckland West today.