Blues overpower Canes

The Blues showed the crowd at Kerikeri they will be a force to be reckoned with when they kick off their Super 15 season in two weeks.
The Blues used their big-name players to their advantage to overpower a slightly underweight Hurricanes side from the start to lead 24-0 after 20 minutes.
The Blues punished Wellington errors early on but both teams began to ring the changes after the first quarter and the game began to lose some of its structure and more mistakes were made in the late afternoon heat.
The Blues were at their best in the early stages of the match but still held the upper hand for the rest of the game, finally winning 33-22.
The Blues performance was a great improvement on their first pre-season match against the Highlanders at Balclutha, said assistant coach Bryce Woodward.
"All in all we're pretty pleased with what we saw out there. It was a big step up from what we produced against the Highlanders, it wasn't perfect and obviously when you make so many changes [to the team] you expect things to get a little disorganised," he said.
Wellington coach Mark Hammett preferred to start with some of his stars, like Ma'a Nonu, from the bench, so Woodward was expecting the Blues to dominate.
"We had most of our rock stars in the starting side while they were missing half of theirs, so we expected to dominate and I think we did that really," he said. "There were a couple of little errors here and there and that allowed Wellington to get back in the game but apart from that, the first 40 was ours."
Chris Lowrey scored the first try following a Hurricanes turnover in the fifth minute, with Stephen Brett laying on the second for Benson Stanley five minutes later. Brett looked sharp at first-five eighth and slotted all of his kicks, including one first-half penalty from 50m.
Northland skipper Jared Payne, in his first season at the Blues, scored possibly the try of the match by being on hand after Joe Rokocoko was chopped down a metre short of the line.
The try was started by livewire halfback Alby Mathewson with a quickly taken penalty inside his own 22m and showed the Blues at their attacking best, as they kept the ball alive despite the Hurricanes efforts to shut them down.
Big lock Jeremy Thrush scored both of Wellington's first-half tries to narrow the gap to 27-10 at the break. He snaffled a wayward tap in a rare Blues lineout error to race 40m to score the first and provided the finishing grunt in the second.
Thrush was thrilled with his haul but disappointed with Wellington's first-half effort overall: "It was a bit of a slow start from our team's point of view but once we started to play our game and held on to the ball things started to go a bit better."
Watching from the sideline in the second half, Thrush said the players' personal skills still needed work with the season almost upon them. "You can keep telling yourself it's early days but we've only got one more game to go before the season starts."
Blues lock Ali Williams came through the game well in his return to top-grade rugby after a year's injury layoff.
"Being realistic, it might take me as long as midway through the season to get where I want to be but for now I'm just happy to be back playing with the guys, it was pretty special."