Stuff to Work on, but Progress Made: USA at WRWC
Stuff to Work on, but Progress Made: USA at WRWC
Can the USA make adjustments to beat Canada in the Rugby World Cup quarterfinals?
Certainly they weren't out of the game, and the weird referee non-calls aside, the Eagles showed they could retain ball, make ground, and score tries.
It was without a doubt one of the best performances the USA has had in quite some time.
“Much better," said USA Head Coach Rob Cain. "I think the quarterfinal is going to be a cracker. Everyone could see ... that we are more than a 30-minute team. It’s a shame when things don’t go your way; there were a few things in the game that caused us to lose a bit of momentum but I am really proud of the players, they responded really well, and I think everyone can see we will have a good quarterfinal.
"For the neutral, I thought it was a great game. Obviously when you lose there is an element of disappointment but if you’d have said to us at the start of the tournament that we would reach the quarterfinals, with the prospect of playing Canada and missing out on England and New Zealand, then we’d have taken that at the beginning. We’ve shown a bit more each game, different elements of our game. We’ve started to show a bit more with our kicking, our defense was much better today and our collision skills, so the more time we have together as a group the better we get. We don’t have a lot of time together, probably a fraction of the time some of the other teams have had in their preparation so, for us, it is all about building and we are really excited about next week.”
Cain is a positive coach. He usually hits us with upbeat observations, so his assessment is not a surprise. But that "much better" quote speaks volumes from him. It means he knows they haven't been playing with consistency. He added to that:
"We are still only really scratching the surface. We have got some way to go with the whole of our game but I think we showed more than what we did last week. I think if we can show a bit more again, suddenly it is a one or two-point game and that’s without some of the momentum swings we created ourselves in terms of our discipline.”
USA captain Kate Zackary is generally a positives-first kind of leader. And again, that doesn't mean she misses things.
"You kind of take apart the set-piece of Canada. They've been exceptional in all tournaments so far and I couldn't be more proud of the girls for disrupting a lot of their mauls, getting a lot of scrum penalties and just kind of showing our progress around the area," said the skipper. “It’s a tough loss to look at right now but I have a feeling when we go back and watch the film there’s going to be a lot that we’re proud of. We did really well at set piece time, that was a big focus coming in. We got the ball wide to our wings, another big focus so, while there’s that we may be unhappy with, there’s so much to be proud of. 1 to 32 this week we had a really great week building up to this.”
Not Perfect by Any Means
But there are things to fix. Both Cain and Zackary said that.
“[Their maul] is very good," said Cain. "They are one of the best catch and drive teams in the world. We have looked at different things to try and stop it but they are very good and very disciplined, and ultimately you have to try a few different ways to battle it. We showed that today but hopefully we can do a better job next week.”
"How could we shut down their forwards?" questions Zackary, "I think that's Canada's biggest threat. It's obvious out there, you know, they've got a decent backline, but they're forward pack is what they do. So, they go through and it's how you kind of pick them apart. So, going into this game, it was making sure we had all of our I's dotted, T's crossed and then how could we go after some of those.
“Yeah, we let a couple [of mauls] in but I also want to look back at some of those that we ghosted a few times; drew two different penalties – those are huge wins for us against a team that’s super clinical and sometimes undisciplined and we highlighted that today so I’m actually really proud of that.”
Canada's clearout was very good. Stealing ball in the ruck was very difficult for the Eagles because of the Canadian clearout.
“We’re a super physically dominant team," warned Zackary. "I’ll say that every single day, we work a lot on it. Defense is something we’re really proud of. As long as we get everything right one through three that first fold then you always see us putting people on their back. Rachel Johnson had an electric game. Kathryn Johnson—our two flankers are hungry for contact so you can always rely on them to go out there and make those hits for us which makes the backs’ job a little bit easier, so it’s fantastic to see anywhere on the field we can go out there and make those big hits.”
So two games in a row against Canada? Zackary sums it up.
“Happy to do this again, that’s pretty much it.”
