Wales were agonizingly close to a first win against the Springboks on South African soil at the weekend but a penalty try at the death robbed them of the perfect end to season.
It was a similar story on the tour of Australia the summer before last and in a number of clashes with the big southern hemisphere trio in Cardiff in recent years and Owens knows that Test matches at the very top level are often decided by the smallest of margins.
“That’s the difference between northern and southern hemisphere rugby at the moment: they are clinical and they take their chances. That’s something we have also seen in the New Zealand-England matches with the three Tests they played,” said Owens.
“We have not been on the money and they have taken their chances. It’s very frustrating. It happened in Australia two years ago, and even in New Zealand four years ago when we battled well in the second Test in Hamilton. There have also been home matches in the autumn when we have got close.
“That has to be the next step for us, beating a southern hemisphere side, and we are close. We know we can do well against the European teams, but you are measured by how you do against the southern hemisphere sides as they are world leaders at the moment.”
Saturday’s showing in Nelspuit was a massive improvement on the previous weekend’s defeat in Durban and, although Owens refused to hide his frustration at falling just short, the Scarlets hooker believes Wales have at least headed home with the hard-earned respect of the world’s second-best side.
“We didn’t come out here to make up the numbers, be valiant losers or put on a courageous face – we came out here to win,” added Owens.
“We believed we could get the win. We did enough but we just didn’t finish them off. We were probably the better team for 70-odd minutes but we made a few errors in the run-up to the last try and it’s another frustrating defeat.
“We’ve been speaking to a few of the Springbok players and some of their supporters, and I think they are a lot more respectful of us than they were last week. We had a disappointing performance last week but this week we had a performance deserving of winning. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, but we’ve got to build from this for the autumn, the Six Nations and the World Cup.”
