Townsend on red alert for trip to Italy
GREGOR Townsend has warned his wasteful side that Italy will have targeted Scotland’s trip to Rome as their best chance of a Six Nations victory — and that they must be more clinical if they are to finish the campaign on a high.
The Scotland head coach watched in frustration as his players spurned three tryscoring chances and gifted an early score to Ireland in Dublin during Saturday’s 28-8 defeat.
Now attention turns to the last match this weekend against Italy, who were easily despatched 38-14 in Wales yesterday. Victory is required if the Scots are to improve on their current fifth spot in the table but Townsend insists their hosts will also be looking to finish with a flourish in front of their own fans.
‘They’ve probably had a red circle on March 17 for a while, that home game against Scotland,’ said Townsend. ‘We’re a really tough team to play and if that leads to wins away even better, but we’ve got to make sure progress continues against Italy next week.
‘We’ve put a lot of effort into this Championship and there have been highs and lows, but at the end of the Championship we want to win.
‘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 and we will take that into the Italy game.’
Townsend insisted there were positives to take from Dublin — and that his side continue to move in the right direction.
‘We caused a very good side a lot of problems and asked a lot of our players,’ he added. ‘This Irish side has a lot of experience, a lot of players in their late 20s having come through together, winning championships, being in last-game deciders for championships. It’s been relatively recent that we’ve won three games in the championship, beating England for the first time in ten years.
‘The more games we’re involved in that are close, or we win, we’ll get that confidence and take us to a place where we’ll contend more regularly, and beat teams like that.’
As for the chances missed, Townsend believes this was a one-off from his side, who were so ruthless in their scoring against England.
‘I am more frustrated for the guys because they are the ones who felt they let their team down by not finishing two on ones,’ he said. ‘The difference between the teams was that we did not take our chances.
‘But 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 but that performance with finishing a bit better will be good enough to beat the best teams in the world.’ Townsend said he would watch the game a few times to find out what his team need to improve upon, apart from obviously their finishing, ahead of the trip to Italy. ‘You can look at the game two ways,’ he said. ‘We turned up, played well, caused a team lots of problems and put ourselves in a position to win a game. Or we can go right, forget all that stuff, the team didn’t put in any effort and we did not finish off two and ones.
‘I’ll watch the game two or three times in the next few days and it’s pleasing to know we caused Ireland problems and we can take on the best and cause them difficulties.’
Ireland head coach Joe Schmidt said the scoreline had flattered his team and on another day Scotland would have scored more points.
‘I had a sense throughout it was going to be a one-score game,’ said Schmidt. ‘It was only a 20-point result because they probably butchered a couple of chances.’