THE last minute of international rugby played by Scotland to date will be used by the squad to spur them on from the first minute of this year’s RBS Six Nations Championship.
Those 60 seconds or so were in the World Cup quarter-final against Australia, who won the game 35-34 with a disputed penalty. For Greig Laidlaw, the Scotland captain, there is no point in dwelling on the rights or wrongs of that decision by the referee, Craig Joubert. Instead, the scrum-half believes that his team can take heart from how close they came to winning that match, as well as being motivated by the pain of defeat both on that day and in all five games in last year’s Six Nations.
“We’re not struggling to get over the World Cup,” Laidlaw said yesterday at the launch of this year’s Championship in the opulent surroundings of London’s Hurlingham Club. “We’ll never get it back. You could forever be disappointed, but that would forever hinder you.
“We debriefed the Australia game and we had a look at it. There were areas we put them under massive pressure, but there were opportunities that would have taken the game away from Australia.
“So these are the small margins we have to find going into the Six Nations. During the tournament there will be opportunities that come up - and we need to take them this time round.
“If we took them against Australia it would have probably been a different story, so you can’t rely on anybody else. You can’t rely on the bounce of the ball or refs. Get our part right, roll our sleeves up and get on with it.”
That is exactly what Laidlaw and his colleagues had to do after last year’s Six Nations, which was far from ideal preparation for the World Cup. The four warm-up games - two of which were won, the other two being narrow defeats – helped provide a transition between the two events. This time there are no friendlies to ensure they get up to speed, but Laidlaw believes that the traumatic memory of last year’s misery will provide them with the preparation they need.
“It's a massive motivation,” he said. “Us as players, we don't want to be finishing up bottom of the pile, and that's what happened last time around.
“We understand how tough it's going to be, but ultimately when we cross the white line we need to come up with better performances this time. We felt as though we made gains from the Six Nations into the World Cup, and we need to push on again to make sure we can put ourselves in the position to win games in this tournament. We have to be back at square one – that’s where the competition starts.
“This is the most excited as a player group that we’ve been. Especially the first time we met up, it was a case we had a couple of meetings but wanted to get out on the training pitch and get better and be a better team. That’s something I’ve never experienced as much as I’ve had in the lead-up to the tournament.”
The claim by England coach Eddie Jones that Scotland have to be favourites for the Calcutta Cup made little impression on Laidlaw, who - like his coach Vern Cotter, and unlike the garrulous Jones – dislikes using ten words when one will do.
“For me it's irrelevant,” he said of Jones’s assertion. “We're not going to get dragged in. We’re going to focus on our own performance and worry about the way we train - those are the only things we can affect.
“Eddie can say what he wants. Ultimately it's just words floating about in the air once they're out there, and we're not going to take them on board.”
If last year’s Six Nations was difficult for Scotland’s players, at least nearly all of them had prior experience of winning in the tournament. It is a feeling that Cotter has yet to enjoy, but the coach is quietly confident that his second campaign will provide some happier times than the first.
"We learned a lot, there's no doubt about it,” Cotter said of his debut tournament. “The frustration and learning we got from last year's Six Nations at the debrief moved us forward and helped us to get better at what we do. Now we're back in again, with not a lot of preparation, but a bit of confidence and belief that we can compete. If we get things right on the day we won't be too far away.”
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