Youngsters relishing England challenge
Lineen’s young guns unfazed by heavy Irish loss
SCOTLAND’s next generation of rugby players are determined to prove true the old adage that you learn most from defeats, as they prepare to face England on Friday.
A day on the beach in Wales to wash away the pain of Saturday’s 38-7 Six Nations defeat against Ireland was the order from head coach Sean Lineen yesterday, while he and his staff pored over the analysis tapes.
Scotland will certainly have to overcome the rustiness in attack that was apparent against the Irish, with outside half Cameron Scott being asked to spark the side in only his ninth game of rugby in the last two years, with most of those in the U20 Six Nations 16 months ago.
“Game time is massive for a young 10,” the Edinburgh player said. “It’s huge, isn’t it? But a few training games that we’ve had have helped, and then on Saturday against Ireland I felt pretty composed.
“I played all of the Six Nations last year, then one game for Boroughmuir and one for Currie. So seven games in two years.
“I wouldn’t say put Ireland out of mind completely. I think there’s a lot of positives from that first half. We were building, and putting them under pressure, and that was good. Then in the second half the red card impacted us a bit [when Harri Morris was sent off for taking out Jamie Osborne in the air].
“But I think we can take our first half into the England match. It will be massive. Just controlling the field, and I feel like we did that well in that first half.
“We can really bring it to England. Obviously they’ve got a few boys from the Premiership, but it doesn’t really take anything away from it. We’ve got a lot of good boys in the team. There’s good heart there, and the physicality. It’s just building on that for the full 80.”
England were outplayed by France’s wide game in the first half of their clash at Cardiff Arms Park at the weekend, with all six teams in action each match day, but a secondhalf fightback based on direct power that earned them a 38-22 victory might not worry Scotland as much as it would seem.
For while Scotland had 15 players on the pitch, before flanker Morris was sent off, forward power was something they had shown themselves.
Morris was a key part of that, unfortunately, but the Glasgow second row pairing of captain Alex Samuel and Max Williamson were strong with the skipper providing the line-out option and some good cover tackling while his fellow lock was powerful around the fringes.
Samuel was looking forward to resting his 6ft 9” frame in the Welsh seas.
“We’re all off to the beach, then there’s a Nando’s back here. It should be good,” he said.
“We have a lot of learnings to take from that [Ireland match] into the next game. There were positives, the lineout and scrum, even at times in the first half our defence was strong.
“Going down to 14 men is not an excuse. We played badly with 14 men. It was difficult, but that’s not an excuse. We were poor in that time.
“The momentum was with us around 20 minutes, 30 minutes. We were right in that game. Set-piece was going well, driving maul was going well. We just dropped off it a bit, and fair play to Ireland, they picked up the scrums.
“It is really disappointing to lose. But there are positives to take from it.
“We played England twice in warm-ups and we were competitive in both those games, so we can take confidence from that. We need to re-group and make sure we give a full 80-minute performance. We should be fine.”