Whether intentional or not, Jamie Joseph left a parting shot at the quality of the current All Blacks squad following the tight test in Tokyo last night.

Japan lost 31-38 as the 14-man All Blacks narrowly avoided their first-ever defeat to the Brave Blossoms. It was easily the closest contest between the two nations with the All Blacks winning 69-31 in 2018.

Joseph, a former All Black, made it clear they will face better opposition when they head to Twickenham in a fortnight.

“The key for us really is to go to England now and replicate that performance against a better side,” he told media after the test.

Japan next face England, currently ranked below the All Blacks, on November 13 before taking on world number two France in Paris the following week.

Japan never led the All Blacks but they closed the gap to four points on several occasions as Ian Foster’s team secured their fourth straight win which moved them to over 50 percent for the first time this year following defeats to Ireland, South Africa and Argentina.

The All Blacks were without the Barrett brothers and veteran lock Sam Whitelock while the likes of Ardie Savea and Rieko Ioane were rested for the Tokyo test.

Hoskins Sotutu is tackled. Photo / Photosport

Joseph said it was small errors that denied Japan a win that would have matched World Cup victories over South Africa (2015) and Ireland (2019).

“I thought our team played very well and we created a chance to win a test match which would have been an historical moment for Japanese rugby if we’d been able to pull that off.

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“The reason we did that is because we’ve got a very connected team. We’ve got 41 players, which means a big part of our group doesn’t get to play at the end of the week, after being together for six weeks. And they help the team prepare for test matches and they do that without any moaning or groaning because they know how important it is in terms of their roles,” he said.

“Our intent was very clear from the start to the last part of the game. What’s disappointing was we probably did enough to win the test match, and we weren’t quite good enough on the evening.

“It really just came down to simple errors, small knock-ons, small mistakes, penalties at the wrong time. But I can’t fault anything else around the players’ efforts,” Joseph added.

Joseph praised the All Blacks by saying his side his side shut down aspects of their game but still couldn’t beat them.

“Now we realise as a team if you make one or two mistakes then your opportunity to win the game passes you by.

“The guts of it really, we just made too many mistakes at the wrong time. Everything else around the game in terms of how we wanted to play and what we needed to do is really really good. Our scrum went well but we gave penalties at the wrong time. Our lineout was very good, we created a lot of momentum because we won the ball at the backend of the lineout, we got over the gainline and then we were able to actually do some really good moves, on the opposition we shut their lineout down, shut their maul down but it still wasn’t enough and that sort of tells you how good the All Blacks are as a team.”