Samoa needs to be polished and patient to impact England at the Rugby World Cup, coach says

Samoa thought it was ready for the Rugby World Cup after going closer than anyone in more than a year to beating top-ranked Ireland on a rainy night in Bayonne.

The Samoans found gaps, stood their ground and gave away no freebies, and Ireland squeaked home from behind 17-13 two weeks before the tournament.

A month later, the promising quarterfinal hopes of a Samoa team with some big names have been snuffed out in Pool D after consecutive losses to Argentina and Japan. Samoa ended up chasing both, hurting itself with indiscipline, forced passes, and set-piece struggles.

A yellow card and converted try in the first 10 minutes against Argentina last week put Samoa in an early hole it couldn’t climb out of. Against Japan on Thursday, Samoa had plenty of ball but the comeback was undermined by yellow and red cards and impatience.

Samoa’s defeats sent England into the quarterfinals and Japan and Argentina to fight over the last berth. Samoa finishes next week against England — a team it has never beaten — with a plan B goal of placing third in the pool to automatically qualify for the 2027 World Cup.

“The best we’ve been was preseason against Ireland when we gave away seven penalties for the whole game,” forwards coach Tom Coventry said on Friday at the team base in Montpellier. “That’s a formula for being in the big matches. It’s just too hard chasing games when you are down on numbers and in the heat.

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“You don’t win very often when you only have 14 men on the field for the period of time (33 minutes) that we did (against Japan).

“There are other aspects of our game which weren’t good enough. Our ability to manage the big moments aren’t high and we are just giving away too many penalties and ill-discipline with the cards. We need to sort that out.”

Coventry, involved with Samoa for 12 years, called himself old-fashioned in preferring the players hit another ruck, keep building pressure, and dragging the defense in further.

“Patience is the key, and understanding when it’s time to finish,” he said. “We haven’t really nailed that either and that’s a big part of our game. We look pretty good when we get in behind teams and there are people coming from everywhere and attacking the ball. It’s just our hastiness to finish movements which needs to improve. It’s not good enough at the moment.”

Japan was willing to make 187 tackles — more than twice as many as Samoa — to patiently wait for an isolated ball-carrier to be turned over or forced into a 50/50 pass.

“We managed to go through the middle of the Japanese at times and it was impressive to watch,” Coventry said. “But defenses are very good at not necessarily committing lots of numbers to their breakdown. You have got to be careful about getting the equation right as there’s only a certain amount of times you can manage to pick through the middle of a team without exhausting yourself.”

Fiji, with the benefit of the Drua base, has the template right after curbing its sevens-style excesses and playing with a solid set-piece and discipline; the forwards’ pick-and-goes shorten the defense to give the backs space to hit.

Samoa had eight more days before facing England in Lille to find the balance again between meaningful carries and releasing the backs.

“It is a do or die (for us),” he said.

Coventry expected England to be full strength to prepare for the quarterfinals.

“(England is) very methodical, very accurate, all the things that we’d look to have in our game,” he added, “so I’m not expecting them to take us too lightly.”

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AP Rugby World Cup: https://apnews.com/hub/rugby