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The USA were on the receiving end of a ruthless performance from the New Zealand All Blacks on Saturday. A crowd of just under 40,000 were in attendance at FedEx Field to watch the world’s No2-ranked team put on a masterclass in attacking rugby.
Eagles Head Coach Gary Gold spoke to the media following the game about his disappointment with the result, but also some positives. Below are a collection of post-game quotes.
“When you play the best attacking team in the world, that’s what’s going to happen for 80 minutes. We will have go back and have a look at it. We will have to see, is there stuff to take out of it?”
“I choose to be a person that will look for the good in what we’ve done, and I think there were passages that there was some good stuff. We’ll take a little bit of encouragement that for those small passages of play we were able to put some pressure on them and ultimately score a couple tries.”
“A scoreline like that… whatever you say… I don’t want to do anything other than just credit the All Blacks for the quality team that they are. That’s the second team they’ve done that to this year.”
“It’s a very tough lesson, but it is a lesson. We will learn from it. We most certainly will. This young group of players will reflect one day on this and, depending on how we manage it as leaders, we must ensure that this is a learning experience and a learning curve.”
“I know it sounds like a silly thing to say, but I just didn’t think our guys gave up. And that’s all I could ask. I just didn’t think they gave up. I’ve honestly been in tears before where the scoreline hasn’t been as dramatic as this and I’ve seen guys’ heads go down, and I didn’t see that with our guys.”
“I know that might be deemed… and will probably be slated for me saying that, but that’s just how I feel. That was the deal that we made at the beginning of the week and the guys just carried on trying. Carried on trying to hold on to the ball and play as much rugby as they possibly could. But credit where it’s due, we played the best team in the world.”
“I’m devastated by the result. I think it would be concerning if, as the coach of the team, I thought we were preparing for a team that was going to give us 100 points. I didn’t think it was going to be that bad. In saying that I knew how good the All Blacks were, and I knew that it was going to be coming as thick and fast as it did come from the very first kickoff.”
“There are situations where it was still in our hands. There were three penalty opportunities where we kicked to the corner, and three times we lost a turnover. Either the throw was skew or we dropped the ball at the front of the lineout. And those are opportunities. On a different day, when we improve as a team, you take a couple of those opportunities and maybe it’s not the scoreline it is.”
“I think the guys worked so hard. I’m absolutely devastated for the guys. I just know how hard they worked. The guys wanted to go out there and make people proud and show that the MLR is producing some really good young players.”
“I think some guys, believe it or not, actually played really well out there today. I thought Bryce [Campbell] played well, I thought [Tavite] Lopeti played very well, I thought Moni [Tonga’uiha] was outstanding when he came off the bench. But that’s going to be lost in a scoreline of 100 points.”
“The first try, that actually came from a move that we had planned. It didn’t necessarily go according to plan, but we knew what we were trying to do. It’s just brilliant for the guys that we were able to get a couple tries against New Zealand. I know it’s not necessarily the starting test team that’s going to play against Wales next week, but only a couple of weeks ago they played South Africa and South Africa scored one try against them.”
