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‘It’s not right for me to talk about previous games’
By Liam Heagney
One endearing thing that you have to like about Mark Jones is that he doesn’t do bluff. His coaching vernacular is of the straight-shooting variety, a style honed in recent years at the Super Rugby-winning Crusaders. He is now working as interim Wales U20s head coach following his aborted spell at the financially collapsed Worcester.
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The Welsh were Six Nations age-grade wooden spoonists just a few months back under a different coaching regime and having taken charge in early May, Jones’ fingerprints are all over the general improvements witnessed in recent weeks in South Africa at the Junior World Championship.
Heading into the tournament you would have feared the Welsh could go the way of Scotland in 2019 when the event was last staged. The Scots finished 12th and were relegated, a demotion that they will only finally get the chance to rectify next week when they participate in the eight-team World Junior Trophy in Kenya.
Rather than battling relegation in Cape Town, though, a refreshed Wales have had a bit more about them, coming within a whisker of ambushing New Zealand and then showing some gas to pull away from Japan with a late flourish after some difficult early moments.
Tuesday’s pool-closing contest versus France was another level, however. The defeat wasn’t as damaging as the 67-17 battering suffered 15 weeks ago when the teams met in the Six Nations.
Wales had encouraging moments in generating multiple linebreaks but the 14-man French, who ended the group stage as the No1 ranked side out of the 12 participants, always had an extra gear to convincingly win 43-17.
Despite the reduced margin, Jones wasn’t of a mind to compare the March result under Byron Hayward in Oyonnax with what materialised in Athlone. “It’s not right for me to talk about previous games,” he told RugbyPass. “I will just focus on this performance and we were below our level in this performance in terms of our execution. I am disappointed that we didn’t take a lot more of our opportunities.
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“We showed that we are a very dangerous team. I know they were down to 14 men for a large chunk as well, but there are definitely elements of our performance that we will be disappointed with. The guys had prepared well, they were clear on what their roles were and unfortunately, under the heat of battle, the skill set in particular hasn’t quite held up.
“The positive thing is that gives us an opportunity, gives us something to focus on. We know that we can fix our own game first before we start worrying about opposition and hopefully we can turn it around and come out of the blocks flying in the next match.”
That fifth-to-eighth-place semi-final will be against Georgia in Paarl and with New Zealand facing Australia on the other side of the draw, Wales will have two more decent fixtures to finish out the campaign. “It’s been a mixed pool,” surmised Jones about their three-game Pool A adventure which harvested seven match points to leave them ranked eighth best out of the 12 teams heading into the play-offs.
“Loads of green shoots in the first two games around our set-piece in the first game and some of our strikes from set-piece, we looked really dangerous with the ball in hand and there was some pretty decent defence in there around the phase play stuff.
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“The second pool match against Japan we showed great game management, good character, dealt with the conditions really well and had some good maturity from young men in what was a tight game and we got away with it in the end. What we have learned against France is you get punished if you don’t take your opportunities. It has been a very mixed pool but the tournament is not over and we have got to make sure we carry on.
“I am happy with the chances that we created. It was definitely an element of our game that was positive; we made 10 linebreaks and they made 12. Just their conversion rate was so much better than ours and we are disappointed.
“We put a lot of work into our set-piece along with other areas of our game. Boys are working incredibly hard in those areas, but we came up against a very strong team and we couldn’t quite contain them at that set-piece and that gave them the platform for their performance.”
