USA XV captain’s message after defeat to strong Australia A side

It's always hard to see the level of improvement in performance when you're playing against a team that is so much more established than you are.

This XVs side which featured many Eagles players is still comparatively young with very few players having more than 25 caps in the Prem or MLR.

And given that the majority of the US experience is tied to the MLR or even College Rugby, they don't have the standards yet that Australia enjoys through Super Rugby.

So the results were pretty expected on the whole and it really would have been quite shocking if the scores hadn't blown out.

Professionalism in unequal and depending where programs are in their development determines the likelihood of the results they can produce.

The US men are still very much an emerging team because men's rugby has been around a very long time but they're still relative newcomers to it.

The new formats should greatly benefit rugby nations like the US who have so many resources they could contribute to the game but need the appropriate incentive to do so.

Results like this would seem to be either a reaffirmation of the status quo or worse show no improvement whatsoever. But that entirely misses the point.

To become the best you have to regularly play against the best to then be able to beat the best. The US simply needs more competition at this level against the same and harder opponents.

They should be hosting regular tour series where they get to play against the Wallabies, against the All Blacks, against the Springboks and against the best of Europe.

Tours to America have the potential to be incredibly lucrative which is why it's becoming more and more popular for the SH nations to take games there.

But imagine if instead of just a one-off match you get to spend a month or more on tour there? The financial implications alone are staggering and pretty difficult to ignore.

Winning the Nations Cup will go a long way to cementing a place for the US in the global order as well provide a basis for comparing and challenging future teams.

Win that and then aim to get into the top 10 and once you're regularly in the top 10 then seriously start to think of yourself as a contender to win World Cups.

It's impossible to accurately measure yourself against a team that is one of the foundational nations in world rugby when you aren't one yourself.

Rugby may have been in America for over 100 years but it's always been well down the pecking order of sports. And it's really only the growth of 7s that has rekindled the American love affair with rugby.

Now with two very good coaching staffs leading the men's and women's programs the growth that has already occurred should be obvious.

But it's never finished. Even when you get to the number 1 ranking the job is never done, as shown recently by both South Africa in the men's and England in the women's.

So they're still very much a work in progress. The match against Rugby Europe champions Georgia is the real litmus test for this team and if they can win that match it will go a long way towards proving the direction this team is headed.