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Watch: Incredible sacrifices Pumas players made during lockdown

By Online Editors
Argentina sing their national anthem during the Tri-Nations round 3 rugby match between the New Zealand All Blacks and Argentina Pumas at Bankwest Stadium on November 14, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Speed Media/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

If you thought Argentina’s win over the All Blacks on Saturday was thanks to a stroke of luck, you’d be very wrong.

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The Pumas claimed a 25-15 win over the All Blacks on Saturday in Sydney – their first-ever victory over New Zealand.

A video posted to Los Pumas’ Twitter page has now shed light on some of the extreme sacrifices and challenges players faced while preparing for the match.

The video showed clips of how player’s trained individually during lockdown and as a team while in isolation.

“I trained over a hundred days in my apartment,” Pumas hooker Julian Montoya said.

“I practised passes in the garage at home,” said Tomas Cubelli

Footage of Santiago Socino showed how he simulated lineout throws with his dad on the roof of their house, while Nicolas Sanchez said he ran 21m in his lounge.

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Pumas react to their historic 25-15 win over the All Blacks in Sydney.

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Pumas react to their historic 25-15 win over the All Blacks in Sydney.

Other players mentioned how they hadn’t seen their family since August, and have had to undergo 16 covid tests since training began.

The video has already racked up more than 700,000 views and 12,300 likes.

Meanwhile, the All Blacks passion has been questioned after captain Sam Cane said it was evident throughout the defeat that the Pumas wanted victory more.

Head coach Ian Foster had similar comments.

“The first 40 minutes they played with all the passion that we were expecting but they were also accurate. We were ill-disciplined again and that’s disappointing,” he said after the game.

“For a country that hasn’t played all year, they had a big cause to play for and you could see that. They turned a perceived disadvantage into an advantage, they were rested.”

The All Blacks have a bye this week as they prepare for a chance to reverse Saturday’s result.

They play Argentina again on November 28.

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Flankly 7 hours ago
The AI advantage: How the next two Rugby World Cups will be won

If rugby wants to remain interesting in the AI era then it will need to work on changing the rules. AI will reduce the tactical advantage of smart game plans, will neutralize primary attacking weapons, and will move rugby from a being a game of inches to a game of millimetres. It will be about sheer athleticism and technique,about avoiding mistakes, and about referees. Many fans will find that boring. The answer is to add creative degrees of freedom to the game. The 50-22 is an example. But we can have fun inventing others, like the right to add more players for X minutes per game, or the equivalent of the 2-point conversion in American football, the ability to call a 12-player scrum, etc. Not saying these are great ideas, but making the point that the more of these alternatives you allow, the less AI will be able to lock down high-probability strategies. This is not because AI does not have the compute power, but because it has more choices and has less data, or less-specific data. That will take time and debate, but big, positive and immediate impact could be in the area of ref/TMO assistance. The technology is easily good enough today to detect forward passes, not-straight lineouts, offside at breakdown/scrum/lineout, obstruction, early/late tackles, and a lot of other things. WR should be ultra aggressive in doing this, as it will really help in an area in which the game is really struggling. In the long run there needs to be substantial creativity applied to the rules. Without that AI (along with all of the pro innovations) will turn rugby into a bash fest.

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