Tolkin Ponders Missed Chances
Tolkin Ponders Missed Chances
“This one hurt.”
Those words from USA Head Coach Mike Tolkin were clear and direct.
“We should have won the game. We put ourselves in a position to win the game. You can’t look at it any other way - we let it slip away.”
Fiji beat the USA 20-14. Twice the Eagles had the ball in a go-forward maul inside five meters and failed to score. Once they had a break just in front of the posts and the pass didn’t go to hand. And most galling of all, Shalom Suniula was clear through and inexplicably passed the ball, a pass that was intercepted.
It’s not a stretch to say Suniula would have scored and Ronnie McLean would have kicked the conversion to put the Eagles ahead.
“I don’t know what happened but it wasn’t the right decision [to pass],” said Tolkin.
As for the mauls, which were halted at the line or held up, Tolkin said Fiji had proven vulnerable against the maul in earlier games, and the Eagles made ground using it. In addition, the USA players felt they scored on one of them, but didn’t get any agreement from the officials (there was no TMO, which didn’t help).
However, the players were at fault, also. They should have switched up the play and sent a short ball to Thretton Palamo, who had a superb game. One can’t help but wonder if he would have claimed that all-too-crucial try.
There were other decision issues, chiefly Mike Petri and his box kicking. Petri has been asked to kick quite a bit under Tolkin’s tenure, but in this game he did it too much. Fiji is so god in broken field play, that kicking to them seemed unwise, and in fact the Fijians scored twice off kick counter-attacks. The Eagles’ poor chase didn’t help.
So there’s the Suniula play, the maul where they thought they scored, the maul where they should have scored, and the kicking. Change one of those, and the Eagles win.
For Tolkin, though, there’s a positive to come out of this.
“We put a team out there that was missing as many as 11 guys, and we were in position to win that game,” said the coach. “Two years ago we had the same sort of game against Fiji and lost 35-10. We’ve made the squad deeper. We found some new players, and we got some good performances out of guys. And they all, I think, get some confidence from this. They realize they can put themselves in a position to win without those guys. In that sense, we come out of it with some good feelings.”
Except one … it still hurt.
