Barclay delighted his exile is history
No sooner had Scotland head coach Vern Cotter and newly announced captain John Barclay arrived to announce the team for tomorrow’s match against Wales, than the elephant in the room began to be prodded and poked, much to Cotter’s amusement.
When Barclay was asked whether he could have envisaged captaining his side two years ago, when he was left out of Scotland’s World Cup squad by Cotter, the Kiwi cracked a rare smile. “That’s a funny thing, I said to John, ‘I guarantee that will be the first question’,” laughed Cotter. It is a reasonable line of inquiry. Apart from one outing against Italy and 20 minutes off the bench against Ireland, both in Scotland’s 2015 World Cup warm-ups, Barclay did not play for Scotland between the defeat by South Africa in November 2013 and the 2015 Calcutta Cup game.
A Test exile of more than two years for a then 27-year-old with 42 caps, at a time when Scotland had been whitewashed in the 2012 Six Nations, spawned all sorts of theories: that Barclay had a slanging match with stand-in coach Scott Johnson; that his laid-back demeanour jarred with Cotter’s work ethic. Barclay, who was the Scarlets player of the year at the time and widely regarded as a player who would have been a shoo-in for the Wales Grand Slam side of 2012 had he been eligible, still says he has “no idea” why he was cast out.
“It was a pretty depressing thought that I might have got my last cap when I’d just turned 27,” he said. “I thought maybe my time had been and gone.”
Yet since being drafted back in for last year’s Calcutta Cup, Barclay has been ever-present. Still only 30 and determined to play “for many years yet”, the Scarlets captain was a no-brainer for the captaincy when it was confirmed that Greig Laidlaw would miss the rest of the Six Nations with the ankle injury he picked up in Paris.
“John has very good leadership qualities,” Cotter said. “He’s experienced, he knows how to talk to referees and to captain a side.”
Barclay’s contribution on the blindside flank will be crucial, given that the Wales back row of Sam Warburton, Justin Tipuric and Ross Moriarty were outstanding at the breakdown against England.
To combat that threat, with the big ball-carrier Josh Strauss injured, Cotter has opted to pair the ball-playing Barclay with two new colleagues, scrapper Ryan Wilson at No8 and John Hardie at openside, in the hope that his big hits will rock back Wales around the fringes. The two other changes are Tim Visser on the wing for the injured Sean Maitland and Gordon Reid starting at loosehead in an effort to bolster the scrum.