Even a hat-trick of wins won’t lift the feeling of regret for rueful Reid
BROKEN by a beating of almost unprecedented severity, chastened by an experience certain to leave lifelong scars, Scotland’s players face a stark choice. Either they let the memory of this humiliation devour them from the inside out — or they find a way to live with the infamy.
The path to salvation is not an easy one. It involves confronting every mental, physical, tactical and psychological weakness so gleefully, pitilessly, viciously exposed by England at Twickenham on Saturday.
Vern Cotter prizes honesty above almost any other value, when it comes to team dynamics. He’ll expect every single player to come up with an explanation of where they failed, individually and collectively, in a loss destined to go down in history as arguably the most painful of all time.
About to take charge of his final Test as Scotland head coach, Cotter’s entire body of work will be viewed differently because of what happened in London. Those are the harsh facts of international sport.
Conceding a record number of points is bad enough. Being on the wrong end of such a smack-down after a build-up boasting plenty of bravado, in a game where everyone — including the bookies — expected the Scots to at least compete, makes it all the more painful.
With supporters feeling as if our highest hopes had been trashed and optimism dashed against the jagged rocks of reality, some of us may never believe in any Scotland team ever again. Call it a crisis of faith, if you will. It’s just that serious.
As the circus moves on to England’s Grand Slam attempt, our boys will return to their old role as bit-part players, trying to salvage some pride in Saturday’s early kick-off — any earlier and it would be in the morning, thanks to TV’s stubborn disinterest — at home to Italy.
Much-improved, brave, more complete... these are the words you’ll hear from neutrals in the build-up to that fixture between the teams now sitting fifth and sixth in the table; home wins over Ireland and Wales at least demand a modicum of respect for Scotland.
Yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re as far removed as ever from the absolute elite end of the game. That our world ranking of No5 doesn’t genuinely reflect the failings of a team too flaky to win on the road.
There is still something to play for, of course. A clean sweep of three home wins, should the Italians be put to the sword, would be noteworthy in itself for a nation more familiar with the Wooden Spoon than mid-table respectability. Scotland haven’t won three Championship games in a single season since 2006.
Yet the scale of the loss to England, allied to the feeling that a win was somehow bludgeoned out of our grasp in Paris, makes it difficult to think about celebrating even a bonus-point victory this weekend.
Prop Gordon Reid, who scored his first try for Scotland during a brief early fightback at Twickenham, conceded that even a hat-trick of victories will leave these players demanding more. And aspiring to much higher standards.
‘If we beat Italy, that’s the best we’ve done for a while in the Championship,’ said Reid. ‘Three wins, that’s the only thing left to play for — we do what we can to get that. We were good against Ireland and Wales. We need to play like that again.
‘But, if we didn’t look back with regret on losing to France and England, there would be something wrong. We’re professionals. We’re competitors.
‘We’re here to win — and do what England are doing now, winning game on game on game. That’s what we want do to. We want to reach those heights. That’s our target.
‘We were fifth in the world going into the weekend, the highest we’ve ever been — and we’re striving to be the best in the world. We want to be the best.
‘It’s important that we don’t let this set everything back. We’ve been on the back of a loss. We need to work on the negatives and do that quickly. ‘Italy is a massive game, a must-win game for us. We need to get further up the table. The Calcutta Cup is out of the window now, the Six Nations Championship is gone — England have got that now — but we can beat Italy and finish higher up.’ Whether Scotland have a starting XV capable of fulfilling Saturday’s final fixture is a live question at the moment, given the horrendous sequence of injuries that saw several players forced into unfamiliar, and clearly uncomfortable, positions. If Tim Swinson had come on at full-back instead of in the second row, it wouldn’t have been a shock. The traditional shortage of manpower, having already robbed the Scots of more irreplaceable performers with every passing week, reached crisis level with the loss of Stuart Hogg, Ryan Wilson and Tommy Seymour.
From the early yellow card to Fraser Brown onwards, however, the visitors were done. Finished. Put away by a ruthless England team who happily accepted the invitation to play their best rugby of this year’s Six Nations Championships so far.
Scotland’s defence was woeful, their repeated inability to prevent the opposition from making ground off the same set move particularly galling for a coaching staff who had prided themselves on systems and discipline.
Suggesting that individual wobbles were more to blame than any institutional fault, Reid said: ‘They came at us in the first 10-15 minutes. We need to learn to gather our thoughts in those situations, stay calm and play through.
‘We never managed to settle — and it just felt like they were scoring try after try after try. It was like a snowball effect, they just kept on coming. There are times when we need to just slow it down and do what we’re good at, try to counteract them.
‘It was hard to take, to be honest. We travelled down to Twickenham with some high expectations of achieving something special. But we ended up on the end of another beating. A beating.
‘I don’t think we deserved to win. We weren’t doing the stuff we were supposed to be doing. We get on with it because we’ve got a big game against Italy coming next. That’s in our thoughts, pushing forward.’