Potent three-quarter Leianne Tufuga received her maiden Kiwi Ferns call-up for the 2023 Pacific Championships on the back of three prolific NRLW seasons on the tryscoring front for Sydney Roosters and Wests Tigers.
The South Auckland product represented New Zealand at the 2018 Tag World Cup, as well as the Samoa and Auckland under-17s rugby league teams in the same year.
Tufuga played for Richmond Roses in the ARL Women’s Premiership and Cronulla Sharks in the 2021 Harvey Norman Women’s Premiership. The tyro was named in the NRLW New Zealand Merit Team after playing all seven games of the Roosters’ premiersip-winning campaign in the delayed competition played in early-2022 on the wing, scoring two tries.
Lining up for the Roosters again later that year in the 2022 NRLW, Tufuga scored twice in five games. She was snapped up by the debuting Tigers in 2023 and slotted in seamlessly at centre, bagging a double and a hat-trick during the first three rounds, and finished the season with eight line-breaks and an average of 128 running metres per game.
Tufuga featured on the wing in all three of the Kiwi Ferns’ 2023 Pacific Championships matches and ran for over 100 metres in each, but the undoubted highlight was crossing for the match-winning try eight minutes from fulltime in an epic 12-6 defeat of Australia in Melbourne.
A mainstay at centre for the Tigers in 2024, the 22-year-old averaged 146 metres for her club and racked up 26 tackle-breaks in seven games before joining the Kiwi Ferns again for the Pacific Championships. Tufuga played all three matches, crossing for an early double against Papua New Guinea and grabbing New Zealand’s only try in the loss to Australia in the final.
