A blessed relief but no reason to get carried away

Published on Sunday 9 March 2008 22:20

IF SCOTLAND beat Italy at the weekend, the players will surely leave the pitch wishing the RBS Six Nations was ten games long rather than five. It has often been said that the tournament is all about momentum, and it will be frustrating for the Scots should they manage back-to-back wins to then have to disband as a squad for another few months just as they felt they were getting into their stride.

If they win well in Rome, they will feel that they have made progress after beginning the championship in such disappointing style. They could conceivably feel the same way even if they lose a tight match, provided their opponents were at the top of their game.

On the other hand, without either the right result or a positive performance in the Stadio Flaminio, it will be extremely difficult, for all the heroics against England, to conclude that a sustainable improvement has been made. Scotland were demonstrably better in so many respects compared to their previous games on Saturday, especially in defence, where a tackle completion rate of 98 per cent was testament to how well they had matched passion with precision. But one game is just not conclusive evidence, especially when the opposition are some way below their best.

Indeed, some of the defects from previous matches remained in the Calcutta Cup contest, but thankfully did not effect the final outcome. The Scots have still only scored one try in their four games, for example, but did not suffer for that two days ago because they also prevented England from touching down.

More concerning for the future was the fact that Scotland not only failed to score a try, they did not even come close to creating one. If it is your final pass that is not coming off, fair enough, you have a simple problem to analyse. But if you come nowhere near a position from which to make that final pass, you've a bigger problem.

Of course, the nature of Saturday's game, strongly influenced by the adverse weather, was never going to produce a try spree. And the English defence was always going to make it difficult.

But the fact is that Scotland's current try count is conceded 12, scored 1. You can win some games by scoring more penalties than the opposition, but not them all. And if the match against Italy is played in the typical conditions of a Roman spring, it is likely to be the sort of open affair in which tries are there to be scored. In other words, while Edinburgh was awash with intoxicated revellers on Saturday night, the more sober message from yesterday onwards had to be let's not get carried away. The Calcutta Cup will always be the biggest date on the Scottish rugby calendar, but we can't start thinking of it as the only game that matters.

Nathan Hines, invariably a forthright assessor of his own strengths and weaknesses, said as much yesterday in his newspaper column. "No point beating England if you're going to lose in Rome," the lock wrote in Scotland on Sunday. "From today the celebrations end and things get deadly serious."

Frank Hadden turned up at the media conference after his team's 15-9 win, and bit back directly at some of the team's supposed detractors. Scotland's tentative start, Hadden said, was "not surprising considering the welter of criticism the players faced. It's not easy to retain your confidence when you have that level of negativity firing around you."

Nor is it easy to retain your confidence when you lose badly to France, Wales and Ireland, and that is the real issue which should be concerning the coach – why the team lost badly, not why supporters and reporters alike dared to mention the fact.

Supporters who pay good money to watch a match have every right to criticise if the team is playing badly. Reporters who are fortunate enough to get in for nothing have a right to assess a match realistically, and a duty to refrain from vacuous cheerleading.

Hadden may be so defensive that he regards any criticism as "negativity", and he may be so anxious to control affairs that he treats any critic as an unruly school pupil. He should see that what he might regard as the most vituperative criticism tends to come from those most desperate for Scotland to do well. People who couldn't care less about the team would hardly waste their time talking about what went wrong and debating how to put it right.