The South Pacific coach David Lake says he was encouraged by the way his young charges dug deep in their opening AFL match against the New Zealand senior team, and the task now is to keep going.
The selection side were beaten 54-21 on Thursday in the curtain raiser to the AFL clash between Sydney and St Kilda at Westpac Stadium.
The teams will meet again tomorrow in Lower Hutt and David Lake says, while a win would be nice, the most important thing is improvement.
"As I said to my boys, don't look at the scoreboard to measure yourself. All these boys have got an exciting gift that they bring to our game, that we don't have players like that in our game, and it's more important that we see them use their special gifts than it is to win on the scoreboard - that's a bonus. We just needed to play and have a quality opposition to learn in that environment I guess. The most important thing now is, when we play again on Sunday, that we actually play a fifth quarter and continue to improve and don't go all the way back to the start."
The coach of the South Pacific AFL selection team, David Lake.
