STUART HOGG proved his doubters wrong in Rome last night by scoring a sensational 22nd-minute try.
The Scotland captain’s score set his team on their way to a morale-boosting first win in this year’s Six Nations campaign.
“I’m very happy,” Hogg said. “We’ve worked incredibly hard over the past couple of weeks to give ourselves every opportunity to win – and we’ve executed.
“The exciting thing is we can get better. But we’ll enjoy that one. We’ve kept the home side to zero points, so I’m very pleased with that final outcome.”
Hogg scored his try from 60 yards out, showing the pace and balance which established him as one of the most dangerous broken-field runners in world rugby to banish the painful memories of the ball he dropped over the line against Ireland in round one and the fumble on his own line against England a week later.
“We talk a lot about creating counter-attack ball with our kicking,” he said. “We managed to manipulate the Italian back three, they kicked loosely – and that’s when we come alive against an unstructured defence.
“There is a lot of method in the madness and thankfully we managed to come up against an unstructured defence.
“It’s a huge confidence boost and we’ll kick on now. The challenge is to take it on to France [in two weeks’ time].”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here