TOWNSEND VOWS TO BUILD ON GOOD FOUNDATIONS
SCOTLAND head coach Gregor Townsend praised his side’s ability to dig out a win when not playing well as they came from behind to beat Italy 29-27 in their final NatWest Six Nations Championship match.
But, speaking candidly, he felt the performance in Rome was a step back on the display in Ireland in defeat.
However, with his side scoring four tries for the first time in this tournament, through Fraser Brown, John Barclay, Sean Maitland and Stuart Hogg, to claim a third-place finish — after a disastrous start to the campaign in Cardiff — he hailed his team’s resilience to come from behind to beat an Italian side that saved its best for last.
‘In the context of the Championship, it was great to pick up an away win and finish with three wins,’ he said.
‘Obviously, we’re looking for more than that but I think today’s game will be as valuable as the win against England, in terms of the experience this group has in how to beat teams when you’re not playing your best.
‘I said before it started that this was going to be a rollercoaster, and it has been. We started poorly (against Wales), we realise that, but we got things back against France and England. I felt we were getting better in each game. Even in the Ireland game, we did a lot of good things.
‘Today, we missed a large part of the first half but we managed to get our game back on track in the second half. But we’ve got a long way to go to reach our potential. It’s been a good experience for the players to get three wins in such a competitive championship but we want to do better than that and build on what we’ve done this year.’
Italy started brightly to steal into a 17-5 lead and again led 24-12 in the second half, former Scotland Under20 fly-half Tommaso Allan — who opted for his mother’s country over his father’s — their key man with two tries and 22 points in all.
But Scotland reeled them in with well-worked tries and Greig Laidlaw again showed his nerve to set up tries for Maitland and Hogg and slot the match-winning penalty after shifting to stand-off for the injured Finn Russell.
Scotland have never finished higher than third, and only achieved that in 2001, 2006 and 2013, and while
the current squad appears stronger and more dangerous than those, Townsend remained grounded when asked about progress.
‘It’s tough to really explain things on “we’re better now than we were a year ago or two years ago or six months ago”,’ he said. ‘Probably in terms of performances in games I don’t think we’ve reproduced our New Zealand performance and our Australia performance but the Six Nations is a different competition.
‘For maybe 50-60 minutes of the England game, we were right up there with what we did in November, and in how we played the second half against France.
‘And big parts of Ireland were better because the opposition were posing more problems, so there’s no doubt that what we’ve experienced in the last six months has been great for our development.
‘We’ve played the number one, two, three and four teams in the world. The number one team we came within a few metres of beating, the number two team at the time, England, we beat, obviously Ireland are now the number two team and we put on a performance that asked them a lot of questions.
‘Against Australia, when they were number three, we produced our best performance of the season.
‘Today, we weren’t playing a top-five team, but it was a team that played really well, that put us on the back foot a lot. We’d like to be a lot better than we were at the start but that secondhalf response, that resilience, was great to see. But we’re judged in wins and losses, and we got a win today.’