By BRIAN LOWE
ATLANTA Rhinos have won their maiden USA Rugby League national championship.
The Rhinos had to come from behind to beat the New York Knights 32-18 in Saturday’s championship game at Life University in Atlanta.
“This is all we wanted,” said Rhinos captain Nick Newlin after the game. “We’ve been here for four years and this is what we’ve been playing for.
“This was the toughest game of club rugby league I’ve ever played.”
The home team started slowly and quickly found themselves behind on the scoreboard with New York getting a converted try by Alex Foster within the opening minutes of the game.
Then towards the end of the first quarter, the Rhinos had a man sin-binned, but despite all of that they fought on to eventually triumph over the highly-fancied Knights.
Atlanta rebounded from their early setback to play their way back into the game and made it 6-4 when Nick Barthel scored out wide, the first of two tries he notched on the day.
Max Pierce and Terrance Williams, who also bagged a brace, followed with two more tries for the Rhinos in the second quarter to give them a 10-point cushion leading 16-6 lead at the main break.
The Knights got one back early in the second half to trail 16-12, but then Atlanta turned up the heat on what was already a very hot day in the Peachtree State and ran in two more converted tries by Barthel and Williams to build a commanding 28-12 lead.
Again New York replied with an unconverted four-pointer of their own, but by that stage the gap was too big to peg back and a final try by each side brought the scoring to a close.
“We are very disappointed with our performance,” said Knights head coach Guillaume Cieutat.
“We simply don’t deserve it given the poor quality of football we generated.
“Congratulations to the Rhinos, who took this game seriously. We just shot ourselves in the foot for 80 minutes.”
It was the final game of rugby league for Rhinos’ forward Salesi Tongamoa, who had announced prior to the match that he would retire.
Atlanta’s Hiko Malu was named MVP.
