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Japan issue 'our guys are ready' warning to England

By PA
(Photo by Koki Nagahama/Getty Images)

Jamie Joseph has urged his Japan players to impose themselves at Twickenham on Saturday as they attempt to inflict another shock defeat on England. The Brave Blossoms fell to a narrow 38-31 loss to New Zealand in Tokyo last month, giving them the confidence to take on Eddie Jones’ men before facing France a week later.

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England, meanwhile, suffered a first defeat to Argentina in eleven Tests last Saturday to open the Autumn Nations Series on a sour note. “The Argentina game was their first match since July and no doubt they will take their learnings,” Japan head coach Joseph said.

But when it counts they are a very resilient team – they overcame the possibility of a series loss against Australia in July by winning two in a row. That’s the kind of team we are up against. We’re expecting a big match, but we play rugby differently and we know we have to deal with ball pressure.

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“The turning point for us will be if we can play our own brand of rugby. We have shown at times that when we get our own game going, we can create pressure as well. We look at England as a very different opposition to the All Blacks.

“It’s a cauldron at Twickenham and it can be very intimidating if you are not ready for it, but our guys are ready. They are really excited that they are going to be 23 men representing Japan in front of 80,000 Englishmen. I don’t believe we are under pressure. I don’t think anybody expects us to win but we have got 23 guys who are very motivated to do well.”

Joseph has made one change for the third meeting between the nations, with Gerhard van den Heever replacing Siosaia Fifita on the left wing.

JAPAN: R Yamanaka; K Matsushima, D Riley, R Nakamura, G Van den Heever T Yamasawa, Y Nagare; K Inagaki, A Sakate (capt), J Gu, W Dearns, J Cornelsen, M Leitch, K Himeno, T Tatafu. Reps: K Horikoshi, C Millar, Y Kizu, W Van der Walt, P Labuschagne, N Saito, S Lee, S Fifita.

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J
JW 1 hour ago
Does South Africa have a future in European competition?

I rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.


He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.


The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).


The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.


The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).


It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.

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