GREIG Laidlaw, the Scotland captain, has promised that the squad will be “brutal” with themselves this week in a bid to cut out the “silly mistakes” that he thought caused them to lose 15-9 to England yesterday. Vern Cotter, the head coach, insisted there were a lot of positive aspects to his team’s performance, but like Laidlaw accepted there is a lot of improvement required before they face Wales in Cardiff on Saturday.
“We’ve got to learn quickly,” Laidlaw said. “Don’t feel sorry for ourselves. It’s such small margins.
“We’ve really got to be brutal with each other this week and stop making silly mistakes. We gave away a couple of dumb penalties and all these things add up.
“We’ve got to go down to Wales and believe in ourselves. There’s still that belief.
“We were six points off England and there were opportunities out there to claim them back. We felt we created some opportunities, particularly in the first half, and put some pressure on them.”
While England also failed to convert some scoring chances, they did record two tries to Scotland’s none, and their defence thwarted some of the best openings created by the home team - notably in the first half when Jonathan Joseph ripped the ball out of Tommy Seymour’s arms.
“Tommy Seymour is almost clean through,” Laidlaw added. “If he holds that ball, we recycle it, we probably score out wide. We cough the ball up there.
“Then instead of carrying in the second half, somebody would just slip a stupid offload or a little knock-on. Then release the pressure valve.
“We’ve got to learn quickly. We know this tournament’s hard, and don’t feel sorry for ourselves. England took a couple of opportunities and credit to them. It’s such small margins.”
For Cotter, such moments as the Seymour break were at least positive in the sense that Scotland had had chances which, with a little more finesse, could have produced more points.
“It’s frustrating,” the coach said. “We created opportunities - enough to win the game - and just weren’t accurate enough in keeping the ball at certain times.
“The good thing is we can put a lot of things right very quickly. As a team we can get so much better.
“In the second half we couldn’t get out of our half. We still had an opportunity - we intercepted and if we’d gone the whole way then perhaps it would have tipped the game. So the opportunities were there.
“We’ll take it on the chin. We won’t take anything away from England’s performance - they defended well. But we certainly need to, and will, get better in certain phases.
“The guys are enormously frustrated. I feel for them. And if we get the drop goal before half-time [a Finn Russell effort that went wide] and get in front, you can turn the game round.
“So we worked ourselves into opportunities to score points. Like I say, I believe there’s so much more to come from this team, and we’re looking forward to next week.”
Asked about England, Cotter accepted that they had done the simple things well.
“They were very physical and held the ball quite well,” he said. “They were playing a percentage game and moved the ball down to our end. At times we didn’t move the ball back down to their end as efficiently as we should have.
“There’s a lot to take out of the game,” he concluded. “First of all we’ll have a really good look at ourselves, and our performance, and we’ll see how we can improve.”
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