Wales team to face Portugal

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 aber-fan wrote:

 GPR - Rochester wrote:

Australia are there for the taking with confirmation that Tipou & Skelton will miss the game. That reduces their overall scrum by 20-30 kgs, takes away two good carriers and means that Wales will be scrummaging against their 3rd/4th tight heads bearing in mind that Alaalatoa didn't make the squad due to injury. 
Barclay continues to make the point that sides who give away 18 penalties to 8 rarely come out on top. That, of course, is Wales' achilles heel also. Australia were hammered at the breakdown which makes the omission of Hooper even more surprising. 

Wales will play 10 man rugby, may well play Morgan & Reffell together & pray that they can keep Cawdor on the pitch for 65/70 minutes. 

We can certainly beat this Australia, but I don't like to count any chickens - there won't be much in it.

What surprised me about the Aussies was the lack of leadership in the absence of Skelton - I'm pretty sure Slipper has been captain in the past, not sure who it was yesterday but it didn't show! Morgan (not captain on Saturday) will show more, as will Biggar. Jac had done a full morning of weights and physical work, BTW, since Reffell was supposed to play... and still lasted 80 minutes!

Not a sport exercise expert by any means, but that seems to me to be a daft idea. Had Jac suffered a slight strain, then we would have been in a lot of trouble. I suspect from now on, that those players not involved in the match day squad will not be doing extra conditioning work on the day of a match. They can always do that post match surely ????

I noticed last season that Dwayne and our coaching team learned from the defeat out in Treviso. we were in that game, and coming back, and I had hopes that we could go on and win. JBW was leading the charge second half and causing all sorts of problems. However it all fell apart when JBR went off injured, and we had no one to bring on as we'd made our substitutions too early. Short on numbers. Benetton spread it wide with the last play and scored a try, taking away a losing BP from us. I noticed in later games last season, there were times when we only used 7 subs, where we did use all 8, the last man came on with 5 mins to go.