Watson and Hogg eager to keep up momentum against Les Bleus
Man of the match Hamish Watson described Scotland’s win over Italy in Rome as “like getting a monkey off our back”. The flanker admitted coming to within a converted try against Ireland and England had been a frustrating experience that made the side determined to win – with style or without.
“It was ugly at times,” he said. “It’s a tough one because we know Ireland and England were games we really should have won, so we definitely needed a win. While this gets the monkey off our backs of winning a game, that’s not really good enough – just winning one game’s not good enough. Now we need to beat France at home.”
Watson said the key to the match was Scotland’s success in isolating Italian ball-carriers out wide. It was, he said, a tactic Scotland worked on and which was spectacularly successful. “We targeted the breakdown and wanted to outperform them, and we definitely did that,” he said.
Captain Stuart Hogg believes that was behind the most satisfying aspect of yesterday’s scoreline. “The great thing is we’ve kept the home side to zero points, so I’m very, very pleased with that,” he said. “Our new defence coach Steve Tandy has worked incredibly hard on our defence and we believe in his philosophies, which the boys are executing very well. We don’t feel stressed with our structures at all
– and we now back our ability to defend. To keep Italy to zero points on their home ground is massive for us.”
While conceding Scotland were wasteful, Hogg said victory showed the try-scoring ability which characterised Scotland when Gregor Townsend first took over is returning. And scoring after his two high-profile mistakes in the previous defeats was clearly a relief for the fullback.
“I’ve had a lot of chat over the last couple of weeks about that [the drop against Ireland] so I wasn’t making a mess of this one,” said Hogg of his try.
“In attack I think we’ve needed to show more patience because we have the players to get us into good positions, but at times we just go a wee bit too early to try to score and cough up the ball. When we’re patient and go through the phases as we did with the Chris Harris try, that was us in control.”
Hogg believes his first win as captain – will be the catalyst for an upturn in performance for this young team.
“I believed in the boys from the very beginning that we could get wins in Test matches,” he said. “We hadn’t performed the way we wanted to in the first couple of games, but this group is now hopefully on track. It’s a huge confidence boost and we’ll kick on now. The challenge is to take it on to France.”
As Hogg and Watson noted, beating an Italian side in a disastrous run of form is one thing, doing so against a France side which has already beaten England, Italy and Wales and closing on a Grand Slam is quite another.
“France’s game in the [World Cup] quarter-finals against Wales was outstanding and they’ve obviously played well this year against England, Italy and Wales,” said Townsend. “They have a new defence coach [Shaun Edwards] who is pretty good so they are a dangerous team and they are coming to Murrayfield full of confidence.”
Scotland, he acknowledged, will have to produce far more than they did in Rome. That, at least, is something everyone can agree on.