From no-hopers to rising force – how Townsend turned Scotland around

A new focus on defence and harnessing a gifted crop of players have put team on course for a modern era record

It is only 13 months since Scotland were beaten by Japan and ignominiously ejected from the World Cup after a campaign to forget. Yet little over a year later they are on the verge of winning a fifth consecutive game, to equal their record in the professional era.

If Gregor Townsend’s side beat Italy in Florence this afternoon – and the Azzurri have not beaten any Six Nations opponents for almost six years – they can lay claim to being t he best Scotland s i de s i nce Townsend himself scored in every game of the 1999 Five Nations as his country won the tournament and went within a whisker of a Grand Slam.

Townsend’s numbers as Scotland head coach are impressive. His win/ loss ratio of 56.75 per cent is already better than all his predecessors during the Six Nations era: Vern Cotter (52.78 per cent), Scott Johnson (31.25 per cent), Andy Robinson (42.86 per cent), Frank Hadden ( 39.02 per cent), Matt Williams (17.65 per cent) and Ian Mcgeechan (41.86 per cent).

If Scotland win in Florence, Townsend’s win/ loss ratio will climb above that of Scotland’s most successful coach, Mcgeechan during his Grand Slam-winning tenure from 1988-93, when Scotland won 57.58 per cent of games.

There are, inevitably, caveats, most notably that World Cup campaign. Indeed, Scotland have yet to win any trophies under Townsend, Six Nations wins away from Murrayfield have been few and far between, and his 22 victories include three wins over Georgia and four against the weakest Italy side of the past two decades.

Yet his roster of opponents is not substantially different from that of his modern predecessors, and his tenure includes some startling successes: the highlights including beating Australia in Australia for the first time, defeating them 53-24 at Murrayfield, an epic comeback at Twickenham and this year’s victory over a France side who would otherwise have won a Grand Slam.

The bedrock of Scotland’s steady growth is the players Townsend has at his disposal. These include superstars such as Finn Russell and Stuart Hogg, but this is also the best generation of Scottish players in many years. No one knows this better than Townsend: the apocryphal story has it that when he was being courted by French clubs in 2016-17, Scottish Rugby Union chief executive Mark Dodson asked him what it would take to keep him in Scotland, and his reply was that he would like to be Scotland coach. Dodson’s agreement led to the unexpected departure of Cotter.

The point of the story is that Townsend did not want to wait, to learn his craft elsewhere, because he knew from his time as Glasgow Warriors coach just how good Scotland’s player pool could become.

His future would be built around the John Dalziel under-20 side who beat their England counterparts 24-6 at Cumbernauld in 2016. That Scotland side included Blair Kinghorn, Darcy Graham, Adam Hastings, Scott Cummings and Jamie Ritchie, while Zander Fagerson, George Horne, Matt Fagerson and Magnus Bradbury were in Dalziel’s squads.

It is no coincidence that since the h u mbli n g in Japan, whic h Townsend says prompted him to go back and examine his entire modus operandi, he has consciously placed his faith in youth. Players in their early twenties, such as Zander Fagerson, Rory Sutherland, Cummings, Ritchie, Graham and Kinghorn, are all regulars in the latest run. Scotland now have the youngest side in the Six Nations, but they are also a team with plenty of caps and one in which every key player will still be in his prime at the next World Cup. Townsend expects Scotland to have “lots” of Lions in 2021, not just in the squad, but also in the Test team. It has been a long time since those expectations existed, let alone were openly expressed.

Only at No 8 is the Scotland coach not sure of the pecking order, and only in the centres is he short of genuine Test quality. What is undoubtedly true is competition for places is driving better outcomes.

If the raw material is there, the coaching team have also been key to the changes since the World Cup.

While Scotland were free-scoring before Japan, for the past 18 months Townsend had become increasingly obsessed with how defensively porous they had become. Under their new defence coach, Welshman Steve Tandy, that has changed completely.

In the Six Nations recently concluded, Scotland had by far the most watertight defence – indeed, they conceded a Six Nations record of just five tries and 59 points – with Townsend’s selections emphasising defensive solidity, hence the inclusion of Chris Harris at outside centre at the expense of prolific try-scorer Huw Jones.

Nor i s Tandy the only recent coaching arrival to make a huge impact. Against Wales, Scotland’s work at the breakdown was exemplary and the single biggest reason for their first win in the Principality since 2002.

Some of their edge in the tackle is due to the form of Edinburgh flankers Hamish Watson and Ritchie, who have adapted brilliantly to the new law interpretations, but the input of new forwards coach Dalziel is also apparent.

The same is true of the set-piece, so often Scotland’s undoing. Indeed, new scrum coach Pieter de Villiers is arguably getting the best results of all Scotland’s coaches. Little wonder that props Zander Fagerson and Sutherland are widely seen as Lions contenders, as are hookers Fraser Brown and Stuart Mcinally.

Scotland are a different side from the swashbucklers of the early Townsend era, a young but hardnosed side who are getting better with each game while winning more tight games than they lose.

This afternoon’s match, against a feisty Italian pack preparing for a dogfight in the tight confines of Fiorentina’s Stadio Artemio Franchi football stadium, will be tough, but Scotland now have a level of consistency that means they are no longer an accident waiting to happen.