His father may be considered one of Scotland’s greatest ever players, but boys will be boys and Adam Hastings was rather dismissive of big Gav’s claims that he has scored more spectacular tries than the one which took Scotland past the half century mark against Fiji on Saturday.
“I haven’t seen them. I don’t watch black and white tv,” the 22-year-old retorted.
Hastings jr was entitled to be feeling a bit chirpy after a delightful little cameo when he came on in the closing stages, ended with him starting and finishing the move which first released Finn Russell, then saw him take the scoring return pass from the man he previously under-studied at Glasgow Warriors.
Joking apart, he knew no-one would be prouder than his parents, either.
“I spoke to Finn before the scrum and mentioned that it might be on for him to go short and fortunately it just opened up and he found me on the return, thankfully,” said Hastings.
“I had a nice 20-metres just to take it in, it was a nice moment. I don’t score a lot of tries and when I do score them I am usually right on the line, you’re not kind of able to enjoy it, so it was just a nice moment with my family up in the stands watching.”
All the more special, too, that his first international try was registered on the same Murrayfield pitch on which, long before Adam was born, Gavin marked his and brother Scott’s Test debuts in 1986 by scoring all 18 Scotland points in a single point victory over France.
“I’ve been wanting to play there since I was very young, so I couldn’t ask for a better ten minutes. That’s the dream to go on and score, so happy days,” he said.
Russell had moved to centre to accommodate Hastings when he was brought onto the pitch and while head coach Gregor Townsend indicated at the weekend that they are unlikely to start matches in that alignment in the foreseeable future, so are effectively rivals for the No.10 shirt, Hastings has the inbuilt self-belief to suggest that there could be room for them to play together further down the line.
“Obviously Finn plays 10 so if he moved out to 12 he will talk a lot, and that just helps you at 10 by giving you more time. So I don’t see why it couldn’t work,” he observed.
“Having two ball players at 10 and 12 – like England have with Ford and Farrell it has worked quite well for them – you can chop and change. It helps with depth as well with injuries and so on.”
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