Happy with that. A little lapse in the second quarter, but other than that it was pretty plain sailing. Gotta feel for Namibia though, they've had an unfairly tough schedule, and were always gonna be feeling it come the latter stages.
Overall the Welsh performance was good, although sometimes players needed to realise that hanging onto the ball and recycling was a better option than throwing a silly offload, Brew being the biggest culprit. The scrum was a mess, and we were getting ourselves isolated on occasions. I wasn't at all impressed with Knoyle or Lloyd Burns, and thought Lloyd Williams and Ken Owens were a massive improvement over those two. For me Ken Owens should be on the bench for Fiji, but it's bound to be Burns again, despite him being a very ordinary player indeed. He tries hard, but he doesn't offer all that much in any aspect of his game, and he gave away lots of penalties and made plenty of mistakes today. Knoyle was simply too slow and indecisive getting the ball out to the backs.
I was impressed with both centres today, thought they both showed quite complete games. Good power, speed and some very good hands on occasion to get the ball past the Namibians rush defence. Halfpenny started very brightly, but faded in the second half. Byrne was solid at fullback, although I'd have expected more breaks from a fullback in a game where we scored 12 tries. He's not hitting the line like he used to, and that's still a massive worry for me. Up front, Jenkins was very good, as was all three locks. The backrow were a little off the pace in places, but both Faletau and Powell had powerful displays.
I thought some of the replacements had big impacts, and the biggest of them all was North. He simply tore Namibia to pieces when he came on. He showed quick feet and great acceleration to make three breaks in a row from kick offs. If Shane is out for the Fiji game, then a wing pairing of North and Halfpenny is still mouth watering, just leaves us a little short at fullback where I was hoping to see Halfpenny play.
Overall, couldn't do much more than that really. Put ourselves in the perfect position to progress though, even if we narrowly loose to Fiji, as I think SA will beat Samoa without too much drama.
my bad.
