GREIG Laidlaw, the Scotland captain, is confident that his team can play even better during the RBS Six Nations Championship than they did in last year’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final.
The scrum-half revealed yesterday that he watched his team’s 35-34 defeat by Australia for the first time earlier this week, nearly four months after the match at Twickenham. Rather than dwell on the error by referee Craig Joubert that gifted the game to the Wallabies, Laidlaw - who will lead his team against England at Murrayfield on Saturday - believes that Scotland have to build on what they did right in that match, and learn from what they did wrong.
“I watched the Australia game last night in full for the first time,” he said yesterday after training at BT Murrayfield. “I got excited watching it.
“I was able to take the emotion away from it. We played some good rugby. It was a great feeling watching some of it. was simply watching it as a game of rugby last night and we played well - but we could have played even better. We were extremely close to making the semi-final.
“We need to understand why we were beaten. There were opportunities within the game that we missed, so we need to have our finger on the pulse come Saturday throughout the 80 minutes. We lost concentration on a couple of occasions during the game. We need to concentrate for as long as the game lasts.
“It’s all of these little things which add up. We we were only just beaten and we could just as easily won. We played with a lot of skill and put Australia under a lot of pressure.”
Laidlaw’s desire for his team to find the same form they showed back then is strengthened by the belief that they failed to do themselves justice in last year’s Six Nations, when they lost all five games. The fact that the last time England played at Murrayfield came north they won 20-0 has also heightened the scrum-half’s desire to perform better this time round.
“We have to turn Murrayfield into a difficult place for teams to come and play us,” he added. “We have to move on from the World Cup.
“We’ve under-performed in the past Six Nations, and nobody’s going to give us a helping hand apart from ourselves. We need to grab the opportunity, but it’s a tough task ahead.”
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