‘Ireland were in trouble’
Scots find World Cup hope
GIVEN that they were on the end of a 20-point drubbing, the bullish nature of Scotland’s post-match reflections came as something of a surprise.
Ireland are a very good team, there was general agreement on that much, but the overriding theme from the visitors was that this was a match the Scots threw away and that there is nothing to fear when the sides meet in their World Cup pool next year.
True, the Scots did butcher three glorious chances — most notably when Huw Jones failed to find Stuart Hogg for a simple ‘fix and give’ — but even if those opportunities had been finished off, Ireland’s efficiency was so ruthless and their composure so unflappable, you feel they would have just turned up the heat and pulled away again.
Not so, according to Scotland’s New Zealand winger Sean Maitland, who felt the visitors had only themselves to blame for losing at Lansdowne Road and had the edge in terms of fitness.
‘It’s just the small details that let us down against Ireland,’ said Maitland.
‘We probably left a good three, maybe even four, tries out there. How we created, there is some optimism there. Of course we are hard on ourselves, that’s what we demanded against Ireland, we were not complacent.
‘We just made a few too many mistakes and that was always going to cost us against a really good Ireland team,’ added Maitland.
‘But we would have backed our fitness. I could see they had their hands on their knees at times. You saw it, we wanted to keep the ball alive, we wanted to play rugby.
‘If we had taken those chances, it would have been different. Big time. We still set the bar high. That’s why we play the game. We want to have fun, we want to score tries.
‘That’s what we need to do to keep progressing — we know where this team can eventually go.’
Gregor Townsend was similarly positive when measuring his team against the Irish.
‘We want to win and it might sound daft because we lost four tries to one but that mentality — the way we defended, the detail in our game apart from the finishing — is what we need to do to win away from home.
‘We caused a very good side (Ireland) a lot of problems and we asked a lot of our players. From the performance, we delivered most of what we wanted from an away performance,’ he added. ‘Look, this Irish team has a lot of experience together, lot of players in their late twenties having come through together, winning championships, being in last-game deciders for championships. ‘We finished pretty well in the championship so far this year and also back in November but we didn’t do it here. Seeing what the players do in training I’m sure that on another day they’d take those opportunities,’ the head coach continued. ‘In saying that, we’re proud of how we played. We wanted a response away from home and we got one in terms of performance. ‘We didn’t get it in terms of the result and that’s what we’re here for, but that performance, with finishing a bit better, will be good enough to beat the best teams Bullish: Scotland coach Gregor Townsend at Lansdowne Road in the world. Sometimes you play badly and get away with a two or three-point defeat.
‘We played well, didn’t take our opportunities and it doesn’t matter to us whether it’s one point or 20 points.
‘That performance was miles ahead of the one in Wales,’ said Townsend.
‘What matters to us was the performance and effort from the players and to know there’s enough in there to have made that game much closer.
‘We turned up, played well, caused a team lots of problems, put ourselves in position to win a game.
‘Three clear-cut chances could be 21 points to us and Ireland scoring off an intercept. It could have been a different game.’
It could have been but it wasn’t and, for all that Scottish post-match positivity, there was a sense of Ireland always being in control on Saturday — reflected in a more muted Lansdowne Road atmosphere than was experienced against Wales.
The teams meet again in Edinburgh in next year’s Six Nations before the defining World Cup pool game on September 22, 2019.
Ireland will hope to be up to speed by then because, the way the Scots are talking, 20-point victories are not all they are cracked up to be.