Wales kicked a few aimless ones or foolish chips in the 1st half, not smt you want to do against the Wallabies. They counter off that and they've got fantastic athletes to do it. Wales quickly showed more patience; they looked good when they put in the phases and ate up ground gradually, but then they'd try to rush things, play faster than their actual pace (e.g. that good attacking position and awful pass on the left wing on the Folau intercept try, or that other big intercept in the 1st H). You get exposed against those SH teams skipping steps, it's all about patience and playing at your own tempo but you can't go slow either. You can't just run them over up front, and they're more than competitive at the breakdown, not to mention how fast they act off a TO.
In the NH we don't have the skills and know-how to commit defenders, offload, create space and run great support lines, brew good numbers out wide… consistently the way they do down there, and playing strong defence is good but eventually they'll break through a few times over 80min of relentless attempts and focused variation on crossing the advantage line. They've got the schemes to do that every Test. Wales couldn't count on their opponents (like in the 6N) committing a shiit ton of knockons and handling mistakes and that slow tempo/secure/ruck game, Aus are too fundamentally sound, so surely the solution was elsewhere.
The two (Welsh) first tries came off the Aussies trying to play too aggressive defense and missing the first tackle creating overlaps and wide open spaces easy to operate in, because Wales showed patience. So MASS ball wasn't so much effective and it's when Wales managed breaks with a tad more intricacy that it started working for them, when Australia was in those backpedaling, unstable positions.
The scrum pen try btw was…mmmm…Wales had the upper hand that entire sequence but the one that gave them the try was…mmm..
Aus also had a bunch of possession, as depicted by the stats (56% in 2nd half, 54% for the game, would've thought more) so great job holding on to the ball, Wales really didn't have a whole lot to work with. In a large sense, the Wallabies kind of forced Wales to play their own style that game.
Aussies won the game because of very good execution towards the end, they obviously changed tactics and went for a game of proximity and accumulated phases rather than stretching the defense wide, collected the 3's from there when it was crunch time. Well done. It really wasn't far at all for Wales, but still, yet another November defeat. It's just quite INSANE it had to come to this and end up that way…someone out there hates Wales with all his heart, some god or powerful thing.
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