IT WAS a curious moment, as memorable in its way as any from a match. The day before their meeting with Wales, with thousands of their supporters already in Cardiff or well on their way, the Scotland squad were heading for a short training run when they heard the match was off.
While they accepted there were sound reasons for the postponement, which came just before the whole country went into its spring lockdown, the visiting players felt particularly frustrated by it. Not only would their whole week’s preparation count for nothing, they would now not have a chance to build on the momentum they had accumulated by defeating Italy then France in their previous Six Nations meetings.
“We were on the bus to the captain’s run at the stadium when we got the news,” Glasgow lock Scott Cummings recalled this week. “Gregor [Townsend, the head coach] stood up and told us. We were looking forward to that game and would have liked to have got the Six Nations finished.
“There was that bit of frustration that we wanted the game done and we felt we were building towards that game. Our past two performances got us to the stage we were going down there confident. We got back to the hotel and packed our bags and got the bus back.”
Seven months on from that Friday in March, Scotland are again in a good place, and go into Saturday’s Championship match - at Llanelli’s Parc y Scarlets this time - on the back of a morale-boosting 48-7 win over Georgia. That result has helped generate a little momentum again, but Cummings also feels those two earlier wins in the tournament can still provide inspiration for the team.
“I think that when we got those two wins against Italy and France we were definitely building,” the 23-year-old continued. “Our defence was getting better and better. The way we were playing was with a lot more confidence and I think that now we’ve come back together we’ve still got that confidence. We’ll go down to Wales pushing and expecting to get a good result.
“It was good to get the win at the weekend over Georgia. They’re a big physical team - from a forwards point of view you don’t get much bigger guys than Georgians - so to put in the performance we did, we were pretty happy with that.
“It was great to come up against guys like that. We enjoyed playing Georgia and feel we have learned certain things from that that will help us this weekend. But we know we’ve got a really big test this weekend and have a lot to improve on.”
You would worry if a player lacked that self-critical spirit and said his team had nothing to improve on, so in that sense Cummings’ remarks are reassuring. But it was also reassuring that Scotland got so much right against the Georgians, especially in areas such as the lineout that new forwards coach John Dalziel had identified as parts of the game that needed to be worked on.
“We’ve not been together too long, so he’s still implementing some of the things he wants into the squad,” Cummings said of Dalziel, who joined Townsend’s coaching team after a spell with the Warriors. “But he has fitted in well.
“He’s the type of coach that allows us as players to give our input. It’s a good combination. We’ve made just one or two minor tweaks and got good results from it against Georgia. There are things we can still work on and I’m sure there are things he wants to bring in and that will develop over the next couple of weeks.
“He coached a whole load of us at under-20s, he was the Glasgow forwards coach for a year and has been in and around the Scotland sevens guys. He has fitted in seamlessly here and brought all his experience from all these different areas into the squad. He’s bringing his game plan into the forwards.”
Scotland will hardly expect to get everything their own way against Wales the way they did against Georgia, but they are in a remarkably similar frame of mind to the one they were in back in March. Having been prevented from playing then, Cummings and his colleagues can now only hope that this time they will do themselves justice when they finally get the chance.
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