Skeldon still able to look at the positives after England thrashing

WHEN assessing Scotland’s 52-10 Six Nations defeat against England in Doncaster on Saturday, it is important to keep in mind that a like for like comparison between the two teams is impossible.

England are a professional outfit filled with players who have had regular game time in the

Aviva Premier 15s league this season, while Scotland are essentially amateur and the 16 home-based players in the squad have had no domestic rugby during the last 12 months.

The away side were right to talk up their chances of securing a shock win pre-match, but the real target was keeping the score respectable. So, we should not be too incredulous about hooker Lana Skeldon’s optimistic take on the loss, which was, after all, a marked improvement on the 53-0 and 80-0 defeats suffered in 2020 and 2019 respectively.

“We are feeling pretty good after that,” she said. “The first half was obviously difficult, but we came out in the second half and showed what we are all about, showed some fight.

“There were some really good bits in there to take into the next game [against Italy on April 17] so we are actually feeling fairly positive. We are really happy with a number of things that went on from a set-piece point of view, so it won’t happen overnight, but I think going into the Italy game we will be feeling confident and ready to go having got the rustiness out of our system after not playing for quite a while.”

Scotland were 33-3 down at half time and with the influential Lisa Thomson in the sin-bin they were looking at the sort of defeat which would have been impossible to put a positive gloss on. However, they battled back bravely and were rewarded for a long period of pressure inside their opponents’ 22 when Hannah Smith nipped over for a try.

The hosts were reduced to 13 players, with Poppy Cleall and Lark Davies both in the sin-bin, but then Scotland suffered a killer blow with the red carding of replacement Molly Wright for a high tackle. England took advantage to score two late tries which sealed the victory.