TOKYO :Japan’s narrow defeat by Australia showed they can compete with the best teams in the world, coach Eddie Jones said after his side fell to a 19-15 loss on Saturday.

The contest was the visitors' first against their former coach Jones, who quit the Australia job to return to Japan soon after their calamitous 2023 World Cup campaign.

"What I'm super pleased about is that now we (Japan) are a team that stays in the fight," Jones told reporters. "We kept going, we could have won the game in the end but we weren’t quite good enough."

Australia coach Joe Schmidt said of Japan’s performance: "There was nothing surprising about how competitive they were, how combative they were."

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