Australia 31 Argentina 34
Australia coach Eddie Jones said he was 100 per cent confident he could turn the Wallabies around before the World Cup despite a last-gasp loss to Argentina in Sydney handing them a second defeat of his second reign as coach.
The error-prone Wallabies looked like they had got out of jail with a Mark Nawaqanitawase intercept try five minutes from time, only for the Pumas to grab a winner in the last few seconds from Juan Martin Gonzalez.
“We’re all really disappointed ... we put a lot into that, though we just couldn’t put enough pressure on the opposition,” Jones told reporters at Parramatta Stadium.
“Every time we got in position to put pressure we either gave the ball back or didn’t defend hard enough. So there’s a couple of things we need to fix which we can fix with a lot of hard work.”
Jones’s first match back in charge was a 43-12 loss to the Springboks last week and with two Tests against the All Blacks to come before the Wallabies head to France for the World Cup, there is a good chance they will arrive there without a win.
The former England and Japan coach said he was convinced the Wallabies remained on the right path and that their fortunes could change quickly.
“Sometimes what you’re doing doesn’t come out in performance and it takes another game or one moment in the game,” he said.
Talking about the positives in the performance, Jones praised the team for battling, but noted how they were a bit like an old car at the moment.
“You fix the handbrake and then the next day the windscreen wipers break and we’re a bit like that at the moment,” he said.
“Last week our set piece wasn’t good this week our set piece was good. Last week we didn’t attack this week we did attack but our decision making around the ball was poor.
“So this is a bit of a process we’ve got to go through, as painful as it as hard as it is, and the team we are today is a long way from the team we want to be tomorrow, but you know we’ll keep working on it and we’ll get it right.”
Australia had scored two quick tries late in the game to overturn a 10-point deficit and take a 31-27 lead with five minutes remaining but the Pumas loose forward dived over a ruck on the Wallabies line to secure a famous victory.
Cheered on by a small but noisy band of their compatriots at the same Parramatta Stadium where they first beat the All Blacks in 2020, the Pumas secured only a third win over the Wallabies on Australian soil.
Samu Kerevi, Nawaqanitawase, Len Ikitau and Nic White scored Australia’s tries, while Jeronimo de la Fuente, skipper Julian Montoya and Mateo Carreras also crossed for the Pumas.
The win will be particularly sweet for Argentina coach Michael Cheika, who lost all seven Tests when he was in charge of Australia and Jones of England.
Cheika was not getting carried away with the victory and said he would have been happy even if the Pumas had not scored a late try to win the game.
The Australian has been at pains to stress that his squad is at an earlier stage in their preparations for this year’s World Cup than the other southern hemisphere teams as he had forced his mostly Europe-based players to have a proper rest.
After a humbling at home by All Blacks last week, however, he saw enough at Parramatta Stadium to suggest the Argentines were on the right path.
“What we were looking for was improvements from what happened last week,” he told reporters.
“It’s like even if we’d gone down to the end, I would have been happy with the improvements. I thought we made some good improvements, although we’ve still got a lot more to improve on.”
Such wins against former World Cup winners away from home are no longer “landmark” results for the Pumas, Cheika said, and he was just happy they had managed to get over the line.
“We were able to find a way to win even though we weren’t playing our best,” he added. “We’ve still got a lot of growing to do for where we gotta go [but] the way they were able to find a way to do it, not just at the end, right through the game
“I felt like we had some good patches. We had some other things that weren’t that great, but I like the fact that we were able to still win the game.”
One area in which Cheika is looking to improve the side in his second year in charge is the attack and, although the Pumas wasted a fair few overlaps, he was happy with how that part of their game looked.
“We’re trying to work out how we can play with more possession but still have balance around our game,” he said.
“The attacking side of the game is something that we definitely need to improve from last year. We didn’t focus too much on the last year. But we know that if we’re going to do well in the World Cup, we need to have that game.”
