Ritchie: Weir still inspiring Scotland
SCOTLAND captain Jamie Ritchie is determined to get his hands on the Doddie Weir Cup later today and make the former lock’s family proud by leading the national team to victory over Wales in their first home match since his death.
Weir lost his six-year battle with motor neurone disease on November 26, a week after the Scots’ last outing at BT Murrayfield against Argentina and just a fortnight after he had presented the match ball ahead of the showdown with New Zealand.
The first Test match in Edinburgh since his passing is this weekend’s Guinness Six Nations showdown with Wales, a fixture for which the Doddie Weir Cup has been contested since 2018.
“It’s probably individual, like how they want to use that (Weir’s memory), but for me personally, the Doddie Cup is something that is special,” said Ritchie, who was sporting a My Name’5 Doddie Foundation hat as he faced the media at the national stadium yesterday.
“And especially in this game, the first one back at Murrayfield since he passed, it would be a nice one to get our hands on. We found Doddie, and we find his family, truly inspirational in the work that they’ve done and we want to make them proud of us.”
In addition to the emotional aspect surrounding Weir’s memory, today’s match offers Scotland the chance to kick off the tournament with back-to-back victories for the first time since they won their opening three fixtures in the old Five Nations in 1996.
The Scots pulled off a rousing 29-23 victory over England at Twickenham last Saturday and all week in the lead-up to today’s match they have been stressing the importance of not undoing all their good work by falling flat immediately afterwards.
“The mood’s good,” said Ritchie. “After the game on Saturday, we got together in the huddle and said, ‘Look, this is a great win, enjoy this moment, but it’s about backing it up next week’.
“We knew we needed to make the right decisions around how we recover and things like that, and we needed to get everything out of training, making sure we did all our due diligence on Wales and making sure that, come tomorrow, we’re ready to start well.”
Wales head coach Warren Gatland has made five changes to the side that lost 34-10 to Ireland.
“It’s a different Wales side to last week and it will probably be a slightly different game,” said Ritchie. “I expect them to be up for it. They’ve picked (Tommy) Reffell and (Jac) Morgan, who are obviously threats over ball, so they’ll be looking to try and slow us up.”