You would not have wanted to have been in the Wales dressing-room when this game finished. Alun Jones was asked if the mood was sombre. “I don’t want to use any profanities,” the second-row forward replied. “In the past we lost [to New Zealand] but this time there was a real opportunity to win and we didn’t take it.”
It is wrong to suggest the game hinged on Jones’s brilliant 60-metre dash following an interception five minutes from the end, when Wales had just moved to within seven points of the All Blacks. “World-class players finish off opportunities like this one and I didn’t,” Jones said, his mood as dark as a seam of Rhondda Valley coal even an hour after the end of the