CAUGHT IN A SPIRAL OF FEAR...

With their heads scrambled, the players focused not on what to do right but on the dread of what else could go wrong. Here a leading mind guru identifies what Scotland must do to erase the horrors of Twickenham

IT’S a long way down from contenders to caught-in-the-headlights also-rans. However, if Scotland are to start climbing back towards the respectable end of the Six Nations table, they’ll have to recover not just physically, but mentally, from the horror of a Twickenham battering unprecedented in both scale and brutality.

Anyone who watched Vern Cotter’s men freeze, crack and crumble under the pressure of facing England with a Triple Crown on the line must have concerns about the potential for lasting psychological impact.

How can they regroup and recover in time to face Italy at Murrayfield this weekend?

Is it possible for even hardened professionals to shake off the mind-rattling doubts embedded by such a beating?

Andy Barton, whose work with England footballers has provided him with plenty of experience in sportsmen falling apart, believes that even sides of enormous potential need to adjust to playing under expectation.

Scotland aren’t there yet. Whether they eventually reach that destination depends on how they bounce back from such an enormous disappointment.

The guru behind The Sporting Mind practice, Barton is an England rugby fan who says he’s still scarred by being at Twickenham for Scotland’s famous win in 1983. He chuckled in response to

Sportsmail’s question about where Cotter’s men go from here.

‘That’s a nice easy one — how do Scotland deal with what they’ve been through?’ he says. ‘It varies from person to person, team to team.

‘If you look at the game, you could see Scotland suffering from a feeling of helplessness that sends you into a negative spiral. When whatever you try goes wrong, you become self-conscious. You start to think too much, instead of just doing what needs to be done.

‘When you’re confident, you think about the things you want to do. When you start to feel fearful, apprehensive and nervous, you think about the things you may happen.

‘That then affects your energy, your concentration, how you play — and it affects what you take from outside factors like crowd noise.

‘You could see this in the mistakes made on Saturday. Both teams made mistakes. But England were strong enough to recover quickly. Scotland weren’t.

‘You saw the same things happen in the Barca-PSG game. When Barcelona conceded a goal, PSG thought the game was over at 3-1, thought they’d finished them off. But Barca found a way to recover.

‘And a lot of this has to do with expectations — internal and external. The external expectations on Scotland didn’t help. They had gone through a good period, there was talk of moving up to fourth in the world. ‘Believe me, a team can become paralysed by that kind of external pressure. The example is the England football team. People think these footballers don’t work hard enough for England, that they’re more concerned with their clubs, that’s where they earn all their money. ‘It’s exactly the opposite. They desperately want to play well for England, desperately want to win something with England. That pressure is paralysing. They are so focused on not making mistakes, they forget how to make things happen. ‘So, for the Scotland rugby team, they would have been much better off as underdogs — like Leicester City in the Premier League last year — because then they would have had freedom.

‘They were probably underdogs at Twickenham in ’83. I was there for that game. It still hurts!’

So, what could possibly have turned Scotland, a team good enough to beat Ireland and Wales this year, into cannon fodder?

‘You have to grow into your belief,’ said Barton. ‘That’s one way of expressing it. Scotland suddenly found themselves being compared with an England team who had won 17 Tests in a row.

‘So it’s almost as if they were there, on that higher level, but they weren’t used to being there yet. They didn’t understand what it took to remain at that level.

‘Now, these guys didn’t become bad players overnight. But I think the sin-binning of Fraser Brown in the first couple of minutes was too much for them to take.

‘Teams more experienced to winning have self-belief that, even in that situation, converts to confidence.

‘And the confidence is what keeps you moving, gives you that extra energy and concentration. It gives you trust in your fellow players.

‘It’s a hard thing to develop. Look at Andy Murray, losing to a player ranked well below him at the weekend. He’s learning how hard it is to stay at No1 in the world, whereas someone like Roger Federer always seems to believe he can do it.

‘In other sports, I would look at examples such as Tiger Woods or even Phil Taylor in darts.’

Against a psychologically strong team like England, perhaps Scotland never stood a chance of recovering from a calamitous opening ten minutes. How they respond against Italy will depend greatly on how Cotter and his coaches handle the players this week.

Laying out the importance of setting the right tone during the usual analysis of the Twickenham game, Barton told Sportsmail: ‘I would only look at the game tape with a focus on specifics that need to be improved.

‘I certainly wouldn’t go through it saying: “You got it wrong here, wrong here, really wrong here …”

‘If you just start showing people their faults too much, they start to rehearse their faults. Sometimes, it’s even better to show tapes of the parts that went well — or whole matches that went well. Look at the stuff you want to repeat.

‘I wouldn’t talk about “winning well” against Italy, for a start. What that does is put expectations on the players — and they stop thinking about the objective, which is to win the game. It puts them in the wrong place. If you expect them to win 40-0, that helps nobody.

‘With this being Vern’s last game, too, how the players respond depends on what kind of relationship exists between them. If they have a good relationship with him, they will want to play for him, want to give him a win in his last game.’