RUGBY LEAGUE
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IT may have been controversial, but Panthers halfback Peter Wallace was a happy man when he saw his field goal attempt sail between the posts at Carrington Park on Saturday to give Penrith a 19-18 win over the Canberra Raiders.
An irate Raiders coach Ricky Stuart claimed his prop Paul Vaughan was impeded while attempting to pressure Wallace’s kick.
“There’s a new rule this year in place where you’re not allowed to have blockers impede a players that’s chasing down the kicker of a field goal. We had a players who was impeded by two blockers,” Stuart claimed in his post-match press conference.
However, the NRL bunker saw no problems and the field goal was awarded.
It meant Penrith – a team which had gone down by less than two points on three occasions during the first eight rounds of the season – finally finished on top in a close encounter.
Wallace was delighted, especially as his side had let an 18-6 lead slip with some poor second half football.
“A lot of relief, we really had a close game though,” Wallace, who was shifted from hooker to halfback for the Bathurst match said.
“The second half was very frustrating. The first half I thought we were really good, second half though there was a lot of dropped ball coming out of our end.
“That is something we’ve been really good at the last couple of weeks, is getting out of our half, but today in the second half was pretty poor.”
Wallace’s one-point winner came in the 79th minute after team-mate Jamie Soward and Canberra’s Aidan Sezer both had earlier attempts waved away.
It was his seventh field goal from 191 NRL matches and while not as spectacular as the 44 metre effort in round three of the 2007 competition which sunk the Broncos, it was still one he will relish.
The victory lifted the Panthers from 12th on the ladder into eighth, their record reading four wins and five losses from nine rounds.
“It’s a credit to the boys, they have been working hard for eight weeks now,” Wallace said
“There have been a lot of tight games and we are looking forward to the weekend off next week and we’ll get ready to go for the week after.”
Aside from his late heroics with the boot, Wallace’s impact was felt throughout the game. He made 29 tackles – a count only one member of his team in Trent Merrin bettered – and took on the Raiders’ line five times.
But Wallace deflected praise from himself onto team-mate James Segeyaro, who made his return from a broken arm. He suffered that injury in a 30-22 round one loss to the Raiders.
While named as the starting hooker, Segeyaro was actually a member of the interchange bench.
He was still given a good amount of game time by coach Anthony Griffin – 52 minutes – and finished with 26 tackles and 118 metres gained.
“I thought he [Segeyaro] was really good, especially being his first week back. He had a bit of spark there, he had us going forward, so it was good to have him back,” Wallace said.