Can Zondagh unlock the defences for Townsend?
Alan-basson Zondagh has been recruited by Gregor Townsend as attack coach with the national side, as well as supporting the two professional teams and players at academy level.
Zondagh is a young man at 35, and has arrived from South Africa via Toulouse, where he helped the French club to achieve the double of the European and French Championship.
Prior to that, he was coach at the Sharks in his native country.
Zondagh takes over from Mike Blair, and it will be interesting to see how he gets on.
Townsend himself has strong views on attack, and was attack coach for Warren Gatland’s Lions on a tour that was heavily criticised for the lack of attacking rugby.
So there are bound to be some interesting conversations.
Scotland have recently shored up their defence, which was a liability at the last World Cup. But it came at the expense of attractive rugby.
Hopefully Zondagh will change this, and enable Townsend’s team to strike a better balance of attack and defence.
We shall see in the autumn internationals, which are just around the corner.
Meanwhile, the Scottish domestic seasoned returned this weekend, with more of a splutter than a bang as six league matches had to be postponed because of Covid infections in playing squads.
Interestingly, a further 10 matches were also called off because of “insufficient” players, or other reasons.
It was hardly the buoyant return to competitive rugby that Murrayfield chiefs would have been hoping for.
During the past year, when matches were called off because of outbreaks of Covid, those teams were deemed to have lost the game by four converted tries – meaning that their opponents received full points, including bonus points.
There is no suggestion of that being repeated in the leagues this season – yet.
Matches will be played on “spare” weekends, assuming there are no more issues as time progresses.
More worrying are the 10 matches that have been cancelled for “other” reasons.
Despite the SRU’S director of rugby development, Gavin Scott, being highly optimistic about players returning to the sport as restrictions are lifted, the announcement that Hawick Harlequins were going to withdraw from league rugby was an indicator that perhaps Scott was looking at things through rose-tinted glasses.
The 10 matches being called off could, indeed, signal a deeper and more worrying issue in the game, which Scott and his colleagues at the SRU may be blissfully unaware of.
Time will tell, and doubtless we will all have to continue learn to live with Covid.
The league season may have to stutter along this year, depending on whether clubs are impacted by outbreaks of the virus amongst their ranks.
But, hopefully, it will not be too disruptive to the playing calendar.