WR U20 Championship 2025
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NZ leading at HT but France look to be the better side. They have been getting scrum dominance and their pack are starting to get on top. Look to be handling the heat a bit better than the NZ team as well. Not winning the final lineout before HT and conceding the try on HT could prove to be costly for NZ. Advantage France imo.
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Baby Blacks could give a lesson in game management and handling pressure to their senior counterparts.
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2 men down and the Baby Blacks score under the posts.
34-26 with 12 minutes to go
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France give a penalty 10m from the NZ tryline. Baby Blacks winning the vital moments.
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They hung in there for the 2nd half. I thought they were done at one point but what a performance!!
Well done boys!!
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After a very average performance against Italy, Dylan Pledger gave a masterful display today. Mosese Bason was impressive, so were Vakasiula and Oudenryn (in an unusual position for him) when they came in. Fale's power in the tight was a big plus. The tight five were dominated by their French counterparts but never gave up.
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Well done to the NZ U20s and the coaching staff as well, I thought the team looked composed and well prepared. Some really nice set-piece strikes as well.
I thought the Oudenryn-substitution was genius, personally. Letiu has a big engine on him so why take him off? And Oudenryn is excellent around the breakdown and abrasive in contact, so his skillset transfers well to that of a flanker.
Going slightly on a tangent here, but with the ABs bench problems, it might be interesting to do something similar to the NZ U20s and occasionally keep Taylor on the field and shift him to the loose forwards, with Taukei’aho moving to hooker. But this is probably the wrong thread to start that sort of discussion.
But it’s great that the NZ U20s are bringing some innovation, both on attack and around the use of bench forwards. That’s been, for me at least, the most pleasing thing to see with this year's U20 campaign, some creative thinking coming through.
