Junior World Champs - Australia vs South Africa & New Zealand vs Wales

Continuing with the Junior World Championships from Argentina, here are another two excellent games from the Under 20 tournament, featuring three of the sides that have made the semi finals, which will take place on Thursday this week.

Australia, South Africa, and defending champions New Zealand all moved on to the semi finals after highly entertaining final pool stage matches. All three sides were in the semis last year too, as well as England, who also qualified and will face the Australians.

In what was probably the match of the round, Australia beat South Africa 42-35 in a classic match played in front of 10 000 fans in Santa Fe. Both sides scored five tries with Super 14 and Sevens stars coming to the fore as each side boasted a wealth of talent.

While South Africa went down in the end, their bonus point wins over Scotland and Tonga ensured that they made the semis as they had more points than Wales and France, the top runners up from the other pools.

New Zealand, traditionally very powerful in this age group, showed once again why theyre two times defending champions as they extended their unbeaten run in the Junior World Championship to 13 matches when they beat Wales 43-10 to top Pool A.

“Our performance today was a lot better than the ones we put out the past two games but there’s still a lot to improve on if we want to progress even further so, next game now we get to go to Rosario which will be a good experience and we’re just excited for it,” said New Zealand captain Tyler Bleyendaal.

“Wales were good, they were big, they were physical, they had a bit of structure there as well and we had to plan our attacks around that. They had great line speed and they put us under a lot of pressure and it was a good hit out which is just what we needed.”

New Zealand will take on South Africa on Thursday in what will be a titanic battle. As mentioned in the previous post, Australia will go up against England. Both matches will be well worth watching live if youre able to, but highlights will probably be posted here anyway. Enjoy.