Losing out on the 2023 Rugby World Cup perhaps hasn't sunk in on USA fans, but following the 16-16 tie with Portugal the players tried to offer some perspective.
"I think we all knew what we were going against," said USA prop David Ainu'u. "We knew it was going to be a tough battle. It was tough but the boys did a good job moving onto the next job. It is what it is."
Effort Level
"I think that if we were in a situation where I didn’t feel like the boys didn’t put in every bit of effort then it would be much worse," said Ainu'u. "But you can't blame the boys; everybody gave everything hey had."
"We stayed in it," added lock Greg Peterson. "We were quite good in the penalty count except the last 20 minutes and it could have gone to either team. We lost chances but we put those out of our mind. We did really well to extinguish negative thoughts and we went from negative to positive quickly."
"We worked extremely hard the last eight weeks; prior to that there was a lot of sacrifice ... to put us in the best possible position to qualify tonight and, listen, it was seconds away from us and Portugal came back," said captain AJ MacGinty. "It's sore but we gave it our best shot. Credit to Portugal for battling back there and working their way up the field but I'm really proud of thw squad, the group."
Moments
There were some key moments and the players discussed a couple of them. The first was when Peterson got close to the tryline only to get penalized for holding on because the clearout was late.
"They had two men over the ball pretty quickly," said Peterson. "They knew we would get to the gain line and they would get guys over the ball and we were half a second late and couldn’t get the cleans right."
