Watch every second of the 2025 Autumn Nations Series live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nThe Wallabies led 14-3 at halftime but gritty Japan reduced the deficit to just four points with 20 minutes remaining to set up a stirring finish.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The contest was the visitors’ first against their former coach Jones, who quit the Australia job to return to Japan soon after the Wallabies’ calamitous 2023 World Cup campaign.<\/p>\n
“What I’m super pleased about is that now we (Japan) are a team that stays in the fight,” Jones told reporters. <\/p>\n
“We kept going, we could have won the game in the end, but we weren’t quite good enough.”<\/p>\n
Australia coach Joe Schmidt said of Japan’s performance: “There was nothing surprising about how competitive they were, how combative they were.”<\/p>\n
Japan now travel to London to take on South Africa at Wembley Stadium next week.<\/p>\n
“We’re going there thinking we’re going to win,” a buoyant Jones said.<\/p>\n
In his previous stint as Japan coach, the Brave Blossoms pulled off a legendary upset at the 2015 World Cup in England, beating the Springboks with a last-gasp try.<\/p>\n
“South Africa are like everyone, if you put pressure on and get in their face they make mistakes,” Jones said. <\/p>\n
“Imagine beating South Africa at Wembley, that would be iconic.<\/p>\n
“I think this team is a better team than the 2015 team, I think they’ve got
the potential to be better. [They] can take on the
best in the world and compete.<\/p>\n
”We want to show the game that we played in the second half for the full 80
minutes against South Africa
. That’s our challenge.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eddie Jones is daring to dream of an “iconic” victory for his Brave Blossoms over Rugby World Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,941,760,85,2500],"class_list":["post-240767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-japan","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-wallabies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}