By Mitch Phillips
LONDON (Reuters) – A surprisingly upbeat Eddie Jones said he felt England played really well at Twickenham on Sunday but paid a heavy price for a series of mistakes and bad decisions as Argentina claimed a notable 30-29 victory.
Not many among the sodden 80,000 crowd are likely to have gone away in quite such a positive mindset after England struggled to turn dominant possession into clear opportunities, though they did score nice tries in each half through Joe Cokanasiga and Jack van Poortvliet.
Hit hard by 10 penalties – six of which Emiliano Boffelli turned into points, as he also scored a try and landed a conversion – England were never able to really get on top despite leading 16-12 at halftime.
“It was a frustrating game. We played really well but made some elementary mistakes and some individual mistakes that kept inviting them back into the game,” Jones told reporters.
“We did enough good things but we did some silly things and sometimes the errors come from trying too hard. We have to tidy it up a bit but we made enough line breaks to win maybe two games.”
Jones said that he feels referees are having an increasing influence on games, with “most moves ending in a penalty” and the spin-off is that players try to do too much, too soon when in possession.
“It was a stop-start game but there are no real big structural issues with our game,” he said. “I reckon if we play that game 100 times the result won’t be the same.
“I feel like the team went out and played how they wanted to play. But though we’ve made some silly mistakes, we can change those things pretty easily. I’m not sitting here thinking we have really strong problems – for the most part we dominated the game.”
Michael Cheika was delighted as his Argentina team ended a 10 game losing streak against England and claimed their first Twickenham win since 2006.
“It was good – tense as well,” said Cheika, who stood down as Australia coach after losing to England in the 2019 World Cup quarter-finals.
“I really liked the way the guys had a really good attitude during the week. None of them had won here before so it was a question of giving them that mental side to go with the technical and tactical. It’s really good for the guys to have had that experience here.”
The teams will meet again in their opening game of next year’s World Cup, but Cheika was playing down the relevance of today’s result to that game.
“I’m not big on the idea of laying down markers – every game is played on its merits,” he said. “Maybe a little bit from a confidence point of view for us but it will be a totally different game in 10 months.”
Argentina came into the match on a three-game losing streak after their back to back victories over Australia and New Zealand in August and Jones said his players had learned from the run.
“We weren’t penalised as much as we were against South Africa,” he said. “The players have taken responsibility for the decisions and though I still think we were penalised too much today, it was much better.”
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Christian Radnedge)
