Australia lock Josh Canham scored a hat-trick of tries in a rampant 57-10 victory over Italy on Saturday for their first Nations Championship success and a fitting farewell to coach Joe Schmidt.<\/p>\n
Australia ended a run of six successive defeats, including their first two matches in the new competition at home to Ireland and France over the last fortnight, with Tom Wright, Brandon Paenga-Amosa, Angus Bell, Len Ikitau, Billy Pollard and Ben Donaldson also scoring in a feast of nine tries.<\/p>\n
Ryan Lonergan added five conversions and Donaldson one more while captain Michele Lamaro and Australia-born Monty Ioane scored tries for the Italians.<\/p>\n
Australia raced to a convincing 38-5 halftime lead as they laid the platform for their first Test win since beating Japan in Tokyo last October.<\/p>\n
It was the last game in charge for coach Schmidt, who is retiring and departs the Wallabies with a record of 12 wins and 19 defeats, including losing last year\u2019s British & Irish Lions series, and hands over to Les Kiss with 15 months before Australia hosts the 2027 Rugby World Cup.<\/p>\n
The Wallabies went through multiple phases of attack in the opening three minutes before lock Canham crossed for their first try and they had two more scores before the 20-minute mark in a blitzing start to the contest as Wright and Paenga-Amosa also went over.<\/p>\n
Canham\u2019s second try came in the 27th minute after Lamaro had put Italy on the board and by halftime Bell and Ikitau had all but secured success.<\/p>\n
The Wallabies were also ahead at halftime in their previous two games against the Irish and French, but any fears of a second half slip after Ioane powered over for Italy soon after the restart were dispelled minutes later as Canham completed his hat-trick.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of how well the forward pack went tonight, I didn\u2019t have to do too much,\u201d said Canham.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve put in a lot of hard work in the past three weeks. It\u2019s been frustrating to not get the results over the last couple of weeks, but it\u2019s good tonight with more of a full performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Italy\u2019s coach Gonzalo Quesada was barred from the match venue and from having any contact with the team after being banned for comments made after last week\u2019s 47-17 loss to New Zealand.<\/p>\n
He was the first to fall foul of new sanctions for criticism of match officials, but an initial two-game ban was downgraded to a single match after an appeal.<\/p>\n
There was also a rare red card for Italian replacement Marco Riccioni, who despite not being involved in the game got sent to the stands for rushing into a sideline scuffle between the two teams.<\/p>\n
Italy have lost all three of their Nations Championship games with defeats to Japan and New Zealand in their earlier games this month.<\/p>\n
Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia lock Josh Canham scored a hat-trick of tries in a rampant 57-10 victory over Italy on Saturday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[859,5,22388,22451,20620],"class_list":["post-33461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-australia","tag-italy","tag-joe-schmidt","tag-josh-canham","tag-nations-championship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}