IN NEED OF A FIRED-UP RESPONSE

Toolis calm but fans want passion

NO hiding place? Not quite true, if you’re a Scotland player. The only hope is that, among those who shrunk off into the Cardiff night without fronting up, there are a few willing to be bitingly honest about what went wrong — and how to put it right.

There was a distinct lack of anger among the tiny knot of players permitted to get involved in media duties following a humbling that should have provoked wall-punching, shirt-ripping, apoplectic rage in any professional. Or, indeed, even a mildly passionate patriot.

Where was the fury, the embarrassed ire, the blood-curdling vow to make France — our next opponents — pay dearly for the offences committed by the Welsh? Honestly, there are times when the Scotland players seem so sanguine, so comfortable in regurgitating the lines fed to them by management, that you do wonder.

Experts at keeping all the interesting stuff ‘in house’, a policy that ignores supporters and their right to an explanation, they seem intent on avoiding any show of emotion.

Ben Toolis, the Australianborn lock guaranteed to be dropped from the starting XV the moment Richie Gray declares himself 70-per-cent fit, offered up a cool, calm and levelheaded response to a defeat that left fans sick to their stomach.

Asked if the Scots had allowed themselves to get carried away by their own hype following the success in the autumn, Toolis — one of the more intelligent characters in the squad — said: ‘I don’t think so.

‘Sometimes, you need a loss like this to make you realise you can’t take things for granted.

‘Sometimes it helps to remind you that you need to be on your game in every single match.

‘We need to keep pushing in the right direction because we all believe in what we are trying to do.

‘Saturday showed we need to be on the ball every time we step out on the pitch. ‘We’re a tight bunch and an honest group — and we’ll review where things went wrong. ‘We will look at the footage and look at the game back to see where we went wrong. ‘We are still young, so there will be some flaws but it’s about getting better and learning from this, as much as it hurts right now.’ To their credit, it’s clear that the players were hurting on Saturday night. The pain is likely to continue for a few days yet. The modern rugby international is an expert at deflecting questions about defeat by explaining that, until the post-mortem has been conducted, there’s no point in trying to identify even glaring faults. In fairness, it’s hard for those out there to get even a glimpse of the big picture; being face down at the bottom of a ruck does not provide a great vantage point for analysing poor positioning by the left winger. Asked if the video review session led by Gregor Townsend will be more brutal than usual, Toolis (left) explained: ‘Obviously, you don’t want to go in on the first day of the week and analyse the mistakes you’ve made. ‘But it’s part of the sport. That’s what you signed up for. Going in on a day when you’ve had a really good win is obviously the best time. But it comes with that other side, the losses. You grow from that. ‘It’s how we’re going to get better and move forward. ‘We try to play a specific style and there are going to be flaws in the system. ‘The only way you’re going to get better is by looking at it again. ‘The first ten or 20 minutes of the game were really fast. The boys were getting back that Test match feeling — a bit of a shock to the system. ‘Maybe there was a bit of the backs trying to step up and take it off us. We’ll have a look and see what we could do better.

‘There were a few forced passes. But, on the next day, they come off and we score tries.

‘Sometimes, we do get a bit carried away, hold the ball in certain situations when we need to be smart with it.

‘You can’t play perfect every match, can you?’

Nobody expects perfection. All we want now is a reaction. France must be ground into the Murrayfield mud. Or else.

‘We need to be better next week, that much is obvious,’ admitted Toolis. ‘We probably tried to force things a bit against Wales, but that’s because we were chasing the game.

‘We’ll look at it from a team perspective and individually, too, because I know some of the boys weren’t happy how it went.

‘You can’t win every match but you can improve — and that’s what we’re looking to do.

‘We will review what happened honestly and move forward against France.

‘It is hugely disappointing. No one wanted to start the campaign like that.

‘From that point of view, you don’t really need me to tell you what the dressing room was like at the end. It was pretty quiet.

‘All the boys are just gutted because we all know we can play so much better than that.

‘The performance against Wales was certainly not a reflection of how we have been playing over the last six months.

‘You are going to have down times in your career and this is one of them. We were miles off it.

‘We need to put it behind us and focus on France, We want to put those wrongs, right.

‘We needed a fast start against Wales, we’d spoken about it all week. But we coughed up two tries pretty early on and it’s going to be a massive hit to you mentally.

‘Even though you try to not let it affect you, I think if we are honest we can say it did.

‘The game was still there for us but maybe we tried to force it after that.

‘Gregor said he felt we were chasing the game from then on in and he was probably right.

‘We simply didn’t perform to the standards of late, or indeed to the standards we’d set ourselves in training all week.

‘We made so many mistakes — and that’s always going to hurt you.’