IT’S SCOTLAND THE BRAVADO
Laidlaw, Hogg and Russell have the quality to thwart Fijian flair and prove Townsend’s men can match class of Southern Hemisphere rivals
THEY’VE got swagger, all right. In such vast quantities that, in all honesty, no one would be surprised if they rocked up at Murrayfield today with Born to Run blasting out of their team bus, the volume cranked all the way up to 11.
For every flash and bang produced by the Flying Fijians, however, Scotland have a plan. Suffocate the visitors. Give them a reason to feel sorry for themselves. Drain them of energy. All tactics straight from the coaching 101 curriculum.
But beyond that? Well, can you even imagine any Gregor Townsend team just sticking the ball up their jumpers, kicking to touch and playing the percentages for 80 life-sapping minutes?
Never going to happen. Especially not with Stuart Hogg and Finn Russell back in a starting XV bristling with evil gamebreaking intent.
‘We want to acknowledge what Fiji have because they’ve got some special individuals,’ said Mike Blair, the Scotland coach quickly adding: ‘But we’ve got some special individuals as well.
‘Stuart Hogg is a guy who would make it into a Fiji Sevens team. We’ve got a lot of talent within our squad. So, hopefully the Fijian fliers will be saying it’s a great honour to play against our flair players.
‘I think it’s a question that gets asked quite a lot about what our style is. The tempo game is definitely a big feature of ours. But we believe that, with the selections we make, we can play in different ways.
‘We feel we’ve got a strong maul, so that will be something we definitely look to do. But we also have ball carriers, guys like Alex Dunbar who will make the gain line.
‘We’ve got passers like Hogg, Peter Horne and Finn Russell, game managers in Greig Laidlaw as well.
‘We pride ourselves on our own fitness, whether it’s against Six Nations opposition or Fiji. I think Fiji are like a lot of teams in that, if you give them a sniff and they get on a roll, the chests get puffed out and they bring energy to the game.
‘If we can suffocate them and put a bit of pressure on them, suddenly the legs start feeling heavier a bit earlier on.
‘So that will be our priority, to put pressure on them so they don’t have that opportunity to puff the chests out and get an extra swagger in their step.
‘I think we’ve got an intelligent group and we go in with a plan — but see how the game is going, then come up with an appropriate game management from there.’
Key to everything Scotland hope to do, of course, is the restored half-back partnership of skipper Laidlaw and the magical Russell.
Both are blossoming in the highly-rewarded, highly-demanding world of French rugby these days, Laidlaw honoured with the captaincy of Clermont Auvergne while Russell is tearing up trees for Racing 92.
Blair, drawing on his own grounding as an excellent Scotland scrum-half, readily declares Laidlaw to be one of the best in the world when it comes to composed leadership from a linchpin position.
As for Russell, the No 10 has caught the eye for some obvious reasons, with some of his most jaw-dropping moments generating more social media hits than a particularly witty Brexit meme.
Yet Blair has noticed more ‘balance’ to the stand-off’s game, too, explaining: ‘In France, you typically kick a little bit more than you’d imagine.
‘You think of the French league and think they throw it around from anywhere — but there’s a little bit more structure there.
‘He’s had to manage games but also had games he’s had to play a lot more. That game-management thing, they put a lot of onus and pressure on the nine and ten in France to deal with those areas and he’s done that well.
‘I think with nines and tens, a lot of how you learn is from your own experiences.
‘I remember my dad telling me, when I went to buy my first car: “Oh, you don’t want to waste your money on a car”. ‘I said: “Ah, but I want to buy one”. He didn’t say anything — so I went and bought one. I then asked him: “Why didn’t you go on at me?”
‘He told me that sometimes you have to make your own mistakes. And I sold the car for like five grand less a year later.
‘My point is that, no matter how much you say something about team management or what we want to do, it’s not until you experience different situations and adapt yourself that you make a better job of it.
‘So, it’s not necessarily just the move to Racing that has done it.
‘That has helped, the way they play.
‘But the experiences he’s had, he’s adapting to that, he’s reading pictures quickly and adapting his decisions to fit.’
Asked if that kind of personal development has been mirrored across the entire squad, creating a unit more capable of mixing up tactics and making quick decisions, Blair acknowledged: ‘That’s the ideal situation, isn’t it? ‘When you’ve got players who have more and more experience, going from five and ten caps to suddenly sitting there with 30 and 40, that is where you want to go as an international team.
‘Because it means you’ve got guys learning and understanding, appreciating different ways of playing the game.’
Scotland have shown Fiji due respect by naming such a strong XV a week before they welcome the Springboks to Edinburgh, with the selection at No 15 particularly telling.
The chat from within the Scotland camp is that Hoggy has been busting the radar gun in speed tests, leaving team-mates trailing and fitness coaches shaking their heads in disbelief over his early return from injury.
Apparently, he’s not as other men are. So there’s a news flash for you.
Given his importance to the team, the SRU’s strength and conditioning guys would probably carry the full-back on to the field in a gold-plated sedan chair if they thought it would enable him to play.
The question isn’t whether Hogg is physically able to hit the afterburners, of course.
But whether he has the mental sharpness, after seven weeks out, to cope with the unexpected.
That Fiji will deliver plenty of that is hardly in doubt. That brings its own challenges. And it requires a flexible approach. One that allows the Scots to show some swagger of their own.