Wales need to 'dust off' heavy Wallaroos defeat

Wales' Alisha Butchers and Keira Bevan console each other in defeat to Australia

In a week where the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) showered us with positive news on the women’s game, so the players suffered a chastening Cape Town defeat against Australia.

In the wake of 37 full-time contracts and a flagship game at the Principality Stadium against England to look forward to in the Six Nations, Wales understandably went into their WXV2 opener against the Wallaroos with their tails up.

And who can blame them? They had beaten their opposition for the first time in their history just eight days earlier, running out 31-24 winners in a nail-biter warm-up game at Rodney Parade.

The Welsh camp had emphasised the importance of backing that performance up this week, but they were the first to admit post-match that they lost the physical battle.

Not only that, they succumbed to their worst Wallaroos defeat as the gold and greens ran riot in a devastating second-half blitz that saw Wales succumb 37-5.

Wales have just a six-day turnaround before they face Six Nations rivals Italy on Friday, who lost their opener 19-0 to Scotland.

Wales’ preparations had been far from ideal. Not only did they have less than a week to acclimatise to Cape Town, they travelled without one of their star players.

Sisilia Tuipulotu was left behind in the UK after what the WRU called an "administrative oversight" in her visa.

Ioan Cunningham was also forced to reshuffle his matchday 23 with Kate Williams and Hannah Jones suffering knocks in training.

But the head coach made no excuses: “It’s the same for Australia as well, we both played last Friday, we’ve both done the same amount of travelling.

“We’ve got to look at ourselves, dust ourselves off, review the game and learn quickly because we’ve got a short turnaround.

“Disruption in the week doesn’t help, it happened last week with three players, it happened this week with two players, but it’s part of what we do, we pick up little injuries and we just have to adjust and react the best we can. That’s why we’ve got a squad and we back everyone in our squad.

“We’re obviously disappointed with the result, but we started really well. We showed how threatening we can be with ball in hand. We had plenty of possession, plenty of territory, but all that didn’t convert into points.

“Credit to Australia, they changed their intensity in the last 25 minutes and pulled away from us.”

A disappointed Wales captain Keira Bevan said: “They definitely won the physicality battle today, we weren't quite there when it came to winning collisions and being dominant there.

"We knew they were going to be hurt after last week and they capitalised on that.

"We’ve got a really short turnaround so we can’t dwell too much on what happened today.

“We have to learn and fix things up rather quickly because Italy are going to be waiting for us.

“They are small fixes that we can get better at and get right during the week. We’re definitely not panicking yet. We are still in a good place moving forward.”

The game was played at the DHL Stadium, the home of the Stormers, but less than 300 fans were in the 55,000-capacity ground.

"It’s not the numbers we want as players,” said Bevan.

“Looking at the crowd yesterday, I know South Africa had a really good crowd when they played Japan.

“It is what it is.”