Darcy Graham reveals Finn Russell's half-time message and relishes the return of France's big dogs

Scotland's Darcy Graham celebrates at full time after the win over France at Scottish Gas Murrayfield. (Photo by Craig Williamson / SNS Group)

A barrage of statistics relating to the weekend Test matches was published on Monday but the key to Scotland’s second-half revival against France was something altogether more simple, according to Darcy Graham.

Gregor Townsend’s side were 21-3 down at the interval but came out and scored 22 unanswered points to win 25-21 in Finn Russell’s first game as captain. “We had a chat at half-time about what we wanted to get out of it, and Finn just said, ‘let’s go out, have some fun and chuck the ball about’,” explained Graham, whose try in the 46th minute sparked the comeback. If the winger makes it sound easy, he’s being modest. Graham showed outstanding speed and awareness to notch the opening score after a perfectly judged cross-kick from Russell. Graham, who missed a large chunk of last season with a serious knee injury, is looking sharper with every game and just managed to apply downward pressure on the ball ahead of France wing Ethan Dumortier.

The dismissal of Zander Fagerson shortly afterwards failed to derail Scotland, who scored further tries through Pierre Schoeman and Dave Cherry. The major caveat is that France were playing a largely experimental side but the way the Scots were able to wrest back control of the match after being second best in the opening 40 minutes came as a major morale booster.

“That’s our game, that’s what we want to be doing, but we didn’t do it in the first half,” added Graham who has now scored seven tries in his last four international matches. “We didn’t look after the ball well enough and never really got any phases going, which meant we struggled.