GREGOR Townsend gave the impression of being a man relieved simply to have his feet back on terra firma last night after a rollercoaster first Six Nations as Scotland coach. Following stomach-churning lows like Cardiff on the opening match day, and giddy highs with home wins against France and England, yesterday in Rome he experienced both in the course of 80 minutes. It kind of summed up this Scotland side circa 2018.
While he declared himself satisfied enough in how his plans have progressed in the space of a harum-scarum last seven weeks, he didn’t spare his side either. There were a few home truths from Townsend for his players at half time, and a few more in the press conference afterwards. Not only had they failed to play any better in Rome this week than they had in defeat against a Grand-Slam winning Ireland side in Dublin last week, but when you take the whole campaign in the round, neither had they managed to piece together a full 80-minute performance which was the equal of their showings against New Zealand or Australia in the Autumn internationals.
“I think I said to someone before, whether it was my wife or my parents, that this was going to be a rollercoaster and it has been during the championships,” Townsend said. “Today was a rollercoaster for 80 minutes.
“We started poorly, we realise that, in our first game. We got things back against France and England, and even in the Ireland game we did a lot of good things, and I thought game by game we were getting better.
“Today we missed a large part of the first half but we still managed to get our game back on track. It is encouraging that parts of the game like the maul and our breakdown work are in place and are real weapons for us, while parts of our tackling have gone well and our defence have gone well. But we have a long way to go to reach our potential.
“Are we better than we are a year ago? You can’t really explain things like that. Probably in terms of performances in games I don’t think we have produced our New Zealand performance or our Australia performance during the Six Nations.
“But the Six Nations is a different competition. For 60 minutes of the England game we were right up there with what we did in November, how we played the second half against France, the last part against Ireland.
“What we have experienced in our last six months has been great for our development against the world’s top four teams. The No 1 team [New Zealand] we came within a few metres of beating them. The No 2 team [England] we beat them. The No 3 team [Ireland], we put on a performance that asked them a lot of questions. We knew this season was going to be really tough. Today we weren’t playing a top-five team in the world but it was a team that played really well and asked us a lot of questions, they put us on the back foot. Yes, we would have liked to be much better from the beginning but that second-half response, that resilience, that togetherness was great to see.”
Captain John Barclay agreed with that assertion – even if everything didn’t run exactly according to plan.
“We came here to win and we found a way to win. We stayed calm, it wasn’t perfect by any manner of means but we found a way to win the game. That has been the story of our Six Nations, when we are accurate we are very good, we played some good stuff. When we played accurately and held on to the ball, we put them under a lot of pressure. The guys are just happy, exhausted, relieved, happy that we came here and left with three wins out of five. We will look back and reflect on the grander scheme of things in the next few weeks.”
While Italy yesterday had the unfortunate sensation of equalling the longest losing run in this competition – they equalled France with 17 – the efficiency of this performance surely put to bed the suggestion that they are not fit to be part of this tournament.
“I am destroyed for the players and the supporters,” coach Conor O’Shea said. “We are coming. Boy, we played some rugby out there against a team who have beaten Australia, England and were very close to beating New Zealand. We were probably a score away from breaking it at 24-12. Yes, at times you could say we didn’t game manage. But the only way for young players to learn is by being out there.”
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