It doesn’t take an expert to say that for the USA to win Saturday’s game against Romania in Bucharest, they need to score points.

Once again, against New Zealand, the specter of not being able to score in the opposition 22 reared its ugly head. New attack coach Nate Osborne said the issue was, in part, that the team wasn’t taking the middle ground. They attacked in tight, and they attacked out wide, but they didn’t test the interior channels - channels 2 and 3 - and didn’t use the short kick effectively.

Right in the middle of it all was scrumhalf Mike Petri, agreed somewhat, but also had a slightly afferent take on it.

“We were building momentum we went through the phases,” Petri said. “As a scurmhalf running back-and-forth, you see that the guys started to get exhausted. Against some other nations something should happen - a break, a penalty - not against the All Blacks. They were pure class. We needed to be more efficient more effective, but also they just didn’t make any mistakes on defense.”

Petri said the team taking more time together always helps and he expects the Eagles to build on their performances this week and next.

“From a numeric standpoint the score - it was a pumping’, but if you were watching you’d see we gave it everything we had,” he said. “The physicality nothing we hadn’t experienced before. New Zealand is just a class team.”

There were scoring opportunities in the game, added Petri.

“If you looked at the first 20 minutes of the game we made a good run,” he said.

But asked if that performance was good enough to beat Romania, Fiji, or Tonga, he couldn’t say.

“That’s yet to be seen,” he said. “Romania is a strong side. We had a lot of lessons to learn, but we showed physically we can go toe-to-toe with the All Blacks, so we can use that.”

Key for the USA will be their offense. They have the players who can make breaks, but its the finishing, especially when they’ve got a ruck on the tryline. That’s where someone like Petri or Adam Siddall has to use some misdirection and communication with onrushing forwards to get over the line.

USA’s game with Romania kicks off at 11:30am ET, 8:30am PT. Goff Rugby Report will have the direct link for live web stream 30 minutes before kickoff.