While Jones was happy with the effort put in by his team in the 22-12 derfeat by Montpellier at the Altrad Stadium, he admitted that the only way to stop falling at the semi-final hurdle is to earn the right to play at home in the knock-out stages.
“That’s two years in a row that we have had to play an away semi final so the biggest thing we learned is that we need to finish better in the pool stages,” said Kingsley Jones.
“You have to do well in your pool to make the knock-out stages easier. But I can’t fault anyone’s effort – a lot of young fellows grew up a lot and some of the senior players really stepped up.
“We kept on battling. We’re all disappointed to lose, there has been a lot of work that has gone into this European campaign, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but we’ll learn from it.”
But Jones believes the experience his young side has gained over the past two European campaigns in reaching the last four twice will only be of benefit moving forward.
“It was good to finish strong and show a bit of character. At times we do need a bit more of organisation and composure, but it’s been a fantastic competition for us and I hope we can retain the positives when we look back at the end of this year,” said Jones.
“We need to get rid of the ‘nearlys’ and the ‘maybes’ to start coming out on top. It was very close and we’re all very proud of the effort shown.
“It was a frustrating first-half because but we didn’t kick our points. I thought we did enough to come out at least 12-6 and that would have made it a different game because we might have been able to force them into some errors if we had kept them under pressure.
“But we all know how good they are at the set piece – one or two scrums were pretty phenomenal to experience to be honest. We just gave them too many foot holds, and if we hadn’t have done that, it could have been a different result.
“For the young guys, the likes of Tyler Morgan and Halam Amos, coming to Montpellier and playing against these superstar internationals from France and South Africa is only going to benefit us in the long term. The one thing that we will be taking from this game is that it showed we were capable of playing with the big boys.”
