Angry Scots on a mission

GREGOR TOWNSEND will urge his ‘angry’ Scotland stars to chop down France’s giants in Sunday’s must-win Six Nations showdown. And he intends putting the huge visiting pack through torture by moving them all over the Murrayfield pitch. The national team head coach, who admitted his share of the blame for last weekend’s hammering in Cardiff, has made

six changes from the team that failed so dismally on the opening weekend of the Championship. Asked if his players had been angered by their own error-strewn performance against Wales, Townsend admitted: ‘Yes. When they see the pictures again. ‘They see, almost by second nature, that you defend in a certain way and get into a flow, that you’re looking at what the opposition are doing and getting the right spacing — and we didn’t do that. ‘To see that picture as a player, of course you’re angry. Why did we not do that properly? Why didn’t we communicate better? ‘The overriding emotion is that we didn’t perform anywhere near as well as we should have done. The responsibility lies with the coaches — and me as head coach. ‘Whether it is selection or how we prepared, the first thing we look at is how we could have done it better. Then we look at the performance of the players and the groups within our team. ‘And there are certain things we didn’t do, which we should do naturally. We’ve spent a lot of time reinforcing that this week. ‘We, as a coaching group, and especially the players, believe what we showed wasn’t a true reflection of what we are capable of.’ Townsend will be watching Jacques Brunel’s team announcement today with interest, adding: ‘If they choose a huge team, which they can because they have those players in the squad, then it will be more likely that they want to use route one and be direct. ‘We’ve got to adapt to that. And, when we’ve got the ball, we move them around. We take them to places they don’t want to go.’