THERE’S NO END TO THE ERRORS
Ritchie rues a day of inexplicable mistakes that hamper progress
THE official statistics available for all Six Nations contests tell you almost everything anyone would need to know about a particular fixture. Almost.
Scotland may just have broken the system, with a fat-fingered, fumbling, fouled-up loss to Ireland that exposed a hole in the numbers. One as big as the chasm kicked in an advertising hoarding by Stuart Hogg.
Where is the category that covers calamitous clustercatastrophes? How can there be no painstakingly-notated tally of double-dunt disasters?
A message to the nerds-inresidence at Championship stats providers AWS. Lads, we’re going to need a bigger computer.
‘Individual errors are what they are, it’s people making poor decisions — and I was guilty of it myself,’ admitted Scotland’s Jamie Ritchie, his thinking not overly muddled by a head knock that required a dozen stitches before he could play on.
‘You can make mistakes, they happen. It’s when you compound those errors that you find yourself in real difficulty.
‘We were compounding mistakes after the break. We couldn’t execute and we were under pressure in the game.
‘It’s international rugby and this is the highest pressure you can face. Defensive pressure comes into it.
‘But we hold ourselves to higher standards — and we’ll look at ourselves over the coming days.’
While the players look inward, with a little help from coaches unlikely to be quite so supportive in private as they are in public, the rest of us will try to find some explanation for what happened on Saturday.
Watch replays, dig deep into the mathematics, study the tea leaves if you like. But how do you explain a series of repeated errors, each successive howler as damaging as the next one, and all leaving Gregor Townsend’s boys looking a desperate sorry mess by time up?
Ireland were very professional, yes. But too often, especially in a second half of unrelenting misery, Scotland played like amateurs thrown into an environment where they didn’t belong.
A pass thrown over Sean Maitland’s head to give the visitors a try. Nice one, Tommy Seymour.
Allan Dell and Rob Harley both converging on Ireland’s stand-in stand-off Joey Carbery… only to let him slip through en route to another touchdown for the visitors. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
As bad as the really eye-catching gaffes that ended in points conceded, however, were the knock-ons. Oh, the many, many knock-ons.
Along with a couple of forward passes, and undoubtedly aided by the fussy refereeing of Romain Poite, these basic mistakes continually prevented Scotland from building any momentum in a sloppy second period.
During one spell, it felt as if our boys would work like Trojans to win the ball, then hold on to it for all of 30 seconds before giving it straight back to the opposition.
In no team sport is that a formula for anything but defeat. In a game like rugby, it’s inviting disaster.
Now, had Hogg stayed on, maybe it would have made a difference. But Blair Kinghorn was an excellent understudy at full-back.
And Ireland losing Johnny Sexton should have unsettled them at least as much; witness Finn Russell’s intercept from Carbery leading to Scotland’s only try.
Some players emerged with points for valour, at least, with Ritchie (right) leading by example in the murky world of the break-down contest.
‘I have 12 stitches in my head but I was always going to play on,’ he said, when asked about the beauty of a wound above his right eye.
‘I wouldn’t have come off if they hadn’t made me. But that is definitely the hardest 80 minutes I have played for Scotland.
‘We put ourselves into some decent positions in the second half but our execution undoubtedly let us down. We gave away turnover ball. ‘We started the game really well and, overall, I thought we played well in the first half. But, again, we gifted them two tries — and you can’t do that. ‘They countered very well and it was disappointing from our point of view.’ The game undoubtedly turned on the four or five minutes right before half-time, when Scotland could not convert extreme pressure on the Irish try line into even three points.
Decisions were made. When they didn’t come off, they looked like mistakes. And then Jonny Gray dropped the ball. One of those days.
‘I was off the field getting stitched right on half-time but there’s no doubt that was a huge moment in the game,’ said Ritchie.
‘You are under pressure and you have to handle that situation better. We need to eradicate the mistakes ahead of the next game against France.’
Scotland have the best part of a fortnight to turn things around, although the high-profile exiles — most notably Russell — will be back with their clubs this week, meaning head coach Townsend will be working with something of a shadow squad. Perhaps he should just order the majority to go home, sit quietly in a corner and think very carefully about what they’ve done.
Although selected players have clearly been fed key bullet points to fire into post-match media interviews, from always naming the sponsors to never sounding
too negative, it’s still possible to detect a real frustration among the leaders in this squad.
They know that they let one slip on Saturday. They understand what defeat does to a Six Nations campaign that had begun in such promising style.
On the eve of battle, captain Greig Laidlaw had quite freely volunteered the idea Scotland can’t be taken seriously until they start beating teams like Ireland.
Fair point, well made. And it can certainly be applied retrospectively to a game that left too many citing the all-too-familiar refrain — would have, could have, should have — in a tragi-comic defence of the indefensible.