Coaches to blame for Finn’s agony
ROB ROBERTSON
FINN RUSSELL’S blunder in front of the posts to hand the initiative back to France in Paris yesterday is being blamed on bad advice from the Scotland coaching team. Vern Cotter’s side had taken the lead in the finely balanced encounter through a wellworked try from Tim Swinson early in the second half. But fearing referee Jaco Peyper was ready to return to the video review to investigate a perceived infringement in the build-up to the score, Russell received orders from assistant coach Nathan Hines to ‘Kick it! Kick it!’. As the ball tumbled from the kicking tee, Russell swung a boot and subsequently cost his side two points as his rushed effort flew under the bar. ‘There was miscommunication from the sideline,’ revealed wing Sean Maitland. ‘They thought Tommy Seymour maybe pushed Scott Spedding so the try would be reviewed. ‘Once you kick the conversion, you can’t go back and review it. They wanted to hurry up and kick it but the ball fell over. To be honest, it shouldn’t have happened.’ Scotland head coach Cotter played down the incident after the match and said: ‘If there was only two points in the game I might be more
interested in what went wrong with Finn’s conversion but there wasn’t so it’s not a priority. ‘I am not sure what happened, you can’t blame it on one thing. I honestly haven’t spoken about it to him but obviously it will come up in conversation tonight.’ Cotter insisted his main priority was dealing with the injuries picked up by his team — especially that of talismanic skipper Greig Laidlaw who damaged his ankle in an accidental clash with teammate Alex Dunbar. John Barclay, John Hardie and Fraser Brown are also causing
concern after suffering head knocks. ‘Greig’s hurt his ankle so we’ll have to wait and see how bad it is,’ said Cotter. ‘The other players who came off with head injuries will obviously go through the protocols and we’ll find out about everyone else who got banged up today. ‘It was tough losing so many players with Jonny (Gray) being our third captain after Greig and then John Barclay had to go off injured. ‘We did lose a lot of players to injury but we are not going to use that as an excuse. ‘We’re not going to be satisfied with a loss when we were so close in a game I think we probably could have won. ‘Our objective is winning games but we did play well at times and we’ll analyse the 80 minutes before the next game in two weeks’ time against Wales. ‘I’m sure the players will be looking forward to getting out on the pitch at Murrayfield and going for the win which they can definitely get.’ Cotter accepted Scotland were second best at the scrum but felt there were positives for his team to build on in the rest of the Six Nations. ‘Credit to the French, they came at us, applied pressure and were very physical,’ said the Scotland head coach. ‘The breakdown was a tough affair, so I suppose to come away with one losing bonus point is better than no points. ‘Overall, I think the players showed a lot of courage in defence to stop them getting a try in the last ten minutes. We defended really well and showed some real strong character. ‘There were bits of the game where we didn’t link particularly well and we need to improve there, but in defence the guys dug in really hard, even though we lost a couple of players. ‘I thought the boys regrouped reasonably well and it wasn’t perfect because we came second best in the end. We just needed one more possession and field position to apply more pressure on them and we didn’t get it and just came up short.’