Warren Gatland was left in the familiar position of praising Wales for heroic failure after they lost to New Zealand for the 28th time in succession on Saturday.
The Wales coach was proud of his team’s efforts after they went down 36-22 to the All Blacks in Wellington.
The match followed the usual recent pattern of Wales sticking with the Kiwis for 50 minutes or so, before the world champions find an overdrive button that always appears unavailable in the Welsh gearbox.
Even so, Gatland said: “The courage to keep playing and not to give up is a huge tick.
“We had 58 per cent territory and possession tonight and that’s a massive number against the All Blacks – we’ve never done that before.
“I’m pretty proud about that performance. There were a couple of key moments which were the difference.
“We’re creating chances and the players are already aware of a couple of things that next week they will do a little bit different because they’ve already learned from tonight.
“They are clinical and those are the small margins that we need to be better at. It’s about freshening them up this week and having a real crack in Dunedin.
“We’ve learned a lot about ourselves this week. We’ll be thinking that we can get better again next week.
“The big thing for us is continuing to compete against the best team in the world. We’ll learn a huge amount from this series.
“They tried to create some tempo in the last 20 minutes, but we were the ones who kept playing.”
The All Blacks wrapped up the three Test series with a game to spare by winning in Wellington.
Much like last week, Wales were well in the contest at half-time. New Zealand struck through Israel Dagg after Dan Biggar had landed a penalty to put them in front.
Alun Wyn Jones dotted down at the corner on the stroke of half-time, before Biggar converted from the touchline to level the scores at 10-10 at the break, but the world champions went on to score 26 unanswered points to make sure they clinched the three-match series with a game to spare.
Ben Smith broke clear to kick off the try-scoring before Beauden Barrett, Waisake Naholo and Ardie Savea crossed.
Liam Williams broke clear to score from 50 metres to spark a late fightback, but by the time Jonathan Davies had used all his strength to barge over, it was too little, too late.
Gatland handed Rhys Patchell a first test start and the Kiwi coach was happy with the fly-half’s performance at full-back.
He said: “I was pleased with the way Rhys went. There were a couple of things defensively that he can work on. He showed some nice pace in that wide channel.”
All Blacks coach Steve Hansen said he was reasonably pleased with the improvement on their first Test performance.
He said: We had a lot more cohesiveness and intensity in the hit.
“There were a lot more dominant tackles than there were last week, although we didn’t get many rewards for getting over the ball.
“There was a lot more clarity about what we were trying to do. We scored five good tries so we have to be happy about our attack play and we defended well for long periods of time.
“Our line-out was a lot better and we managed to put pressure on their ball. They resorted to having to throw people on the ground and we scored two set-piece tries from scrum.”
