YOU’RE CHEATS
Gregor hits out at rivals
ENGLAND were last night accused of serial cheating by Scotland coach Gregor Townsend.
The temperature ahead of Saturday’s Six Nations Calcutta Cup clash at Murrayfield is approaching boiling point.
And it could explode today when Townsend and England coach Eddie Jones meet referee Nigel Owens.
Townsend believes England’s blitz defence, which shut out Wales a fortnight ago, has been built around repeat offside offences and he is sure to ask Owens to keep England within the rules.
“It will be interesting to see whether they stay onside,” he said. “You would need to look at their last few games to see whether they do come offside.
“It’s down to the refereeing team this week to deal with if it does happen.” England thrashed Scotland 61-21 at Twickenham last year but this is the clash that fires the Scots up the most.
“It does have extra,” added Townsend. “It is the fixture that brings more focus and more edge.
“In 2000, we lost every game in that campaign but we won the final game against England and it was such a huge boost to the country. The other four defeats seemed to be forgotten.
“We know what it means to our supporters and to our players – we can see that in how they’ve trained this week.”
Scotland have not scored a try against England at Murrayfield since 2004 and have not beaten them home or away since 2008 but flanker Hamish Watson believes they can put that right on Saturday.
He said: “Compared to 10 years ago, five years ago, we do score a lot more tries.
“We are scoring more tries against most of the other teams, so we’ve got to try to implement that against England.
“But I don’t think we have to score tries to win, it just means our defence is going to have to be pretty top notch.”