HASTINGS A RAY OF HOPE FOR FUTURE DESPITE AGONY OF LOSS
HE wasn’t quite at his scintillating best, but Adam Hastings can be proud of his performance in Cardiff yesterday. After a fairly quiet start, he really grew into the game in the second half and looked incredibly composed for a young player at such a tough venue.
He will be so much better for the experience. You never forget your first taste of the Principality Stadium because it’s such a unique cauldron in world rugby.
It would be easy for a young player to be a rabbit in the headlights in that environment. But he wasn’t like that at all.
Even the odd little mistake that he did make, he was able to compose himself and move on from it really quickly.
At 22 years of age, Hastings is still very much at the start of his international career. It’s a huge boost for Gregor Townsend to have two excellent options at fly-half.
It was only a few years ago that Scotland were scrapping around trying to get one good player at 10. We now have Finn Russell, who is world-class. And we have Hastings, who has been electric for Glasgow this season and has immense potential with Scotland.
Russell will be available for selection for the Fiji game next week and there will be a temptation for Townsend to bring him back immediately because he’s an outstanding talent.
But that might be a little premature. Hastings deserves another chance to go again next week against the Fijians.
He didn’t really do a great deal wrong yesterday. He will also have a sell-out home crowd behind him next Saturday at Murrayfield.
The style of the game against Fiji will suit him. It will be a lot more unstructured than it was yesterday and he will have the chance to really show his talents with ball in hand.
It was always going to feel funny having this fourth fixture outside of the official international window, but it was definitely a worthwhile exercise.
The standing ovation for Doddie Weir prior to kick-off was really special. That was a chance for the whole rugby family to come together and show their support.
There was a great moment when the cameras cut to Doddie and he kissed his wife. He knew he was on the big screens in the stadium. He obviously had it planned and had a great big smile on his face as soon as he did it. His sense of humour is as good now as it ever was.
It was great that both the Welsh and Scottish Unions made a donation to Doddie’s charity. For them not to do so would just have been wrong.
We want to do well in these autumn internationals and we want to win the World Cup, but the bigger focus is now preparing for the World Cup.
We are just 12 months away now and everything that happens will ultimately be related to Japan next year — results, team selection and various other factors.
Townsend got the chance to take a look at some relatively new players and see how they could handle the pressure of playing away from home.
We had a couple of lapses in defence and didn’t quite take full advantage of our field position at times, but we certainly didn’t play badly. We were still well in the hunt to win the game for long spells. George North is a fantastic player. A huge guy for a winger, but we are capable of
tackling big guys. You have to be in Test rugby. We have a really good centre pairing in Huw Jones and Alex Dunbar, but they could have done better defensively at times. We know how good both of them can be going forward. But there are times when you need to be able to do the other side of things. Stand firm and make your tackles when they really count. Jonny Gray had a try ruled out, while Peter Horne and Blair Kinghorn seemed to get in the way of each other for another potential score. That could easily have been another couple of tries on the board if things had gone different and we had been a bit more clinical. I wanted to see Darcy Graham get the ball in his hands more often. He looks really exciting and I’m sure it won’t be too long before we see more of him in a Scotland jersey. Ali Price can be proud of his performance as well. By his own admission, things didn’t go too well for him in Cardiff in the Six Nations earlier this year. But he looked good yesterday. He looked like a composed, international-class scrum-half and you could see the way he guided Hastings through the game. It would be good to see those two given the chance to go again next week. Hastings, in particular.