Another five minutes and we’d have done it: Jones
LONDON: Eddie Jones was so upbeat after England’s onepoint defeat by New Zealand yesterday that he would probably have had to be scraped off the ceiling had Sam Underhill’s late try not been ruled out for offside.
Trailing 1615, England thought it had snatched the game when Underhill scored after a chargedown with four minutes to go, only for the TMO to rule out the score for an offside decision against Courtney Lawes.
That condemned England to yet another defeat at the hands of the world champion All Blacks, who have now won 15 of the teams’ last 16 meetings. But Jones took the preferred coaching path of looking for the positives, having been on the right side of a singlepoint margin against South Africa last week.
‘‘It was a fantastic game of rugby. We’re obviously devastated, but you take the good with the bad and we’ll take a lot from that,’’ Jones told reporters.
‘‘We had opportunities to win the game. We didn’t take them, they did so they deserved to win but it was a good testmatch tussle that we are only going to improve from.
‘‘It was a really good step forward because you benchmark yourself against New Zea land and we will get a lot of reward for the work we’ve done.
‘‘I thought we played the final 20 exceptionally well. If you look at any sort of metrics in the last 20, we won it and we’ll take enormous confidence from that,’’ Jones said.
‘‘New Zealand generally run away from teams in that area and they couldn’t. They couldn’t break us. In fact, we finished stronger. If we’d kept going for another five minutes, we would have got them. We’re excited about where we’re going.’’
England fans might rue two decisions to kick to the corner from two penalties well within Owen Farrell’s range, neither of which paid off as their lineout struggled, but Jones supported the calls.
‘‘The players feel the game — we see it — and if they feel that there is an opportunity to crack the opposition they have got to go for it,’’ he said. ‘‘Otherwise, why do we want leaders in the team?’’ — Reuters