De Luca over his painful missed pick-up and raring to go again

EDINBURGH welcomed back World Cup internationalists yesterday with a clear desire to begin the process of burying deflation born in New Zealand and beginning the process of learning from it.

After his first session back at Murrayfield in Edinburgh’s black-and-red colours, centre Nick de Luca acknowledged that it might take some time for supporters to forget his spilled pick-up metres from the England line that might have brought a match-winning try. For him the painful memory has drifted, he insisted, but the lesson from his first World Cup of the relation of tries to victories remains pretty clear.

“Unfortunately for me, the general Joe will remember that pick-up as where I could have scored and taken Scotland through,” he said with an accepting sigh, “but when you see it on video Jonny Wilkinson is a good tackler and he was coming across and Tom Croft was there, and even if I had scored and we’d won the way it turned out we still wouldn’t have gone through to the quarters, so I suppose that eased the pain a bit.

“Overall, I was happy with my contributions to the three games I played in, but my main regret, and it’s one I could not have done anything about, was that I never got the chance to play in good weather and play the kind of attacking rugby I love. It was more duty-based stuff, which is the way it goes whether you like it or not in those conditions.

“Games always change with the weather and they’re never as free-flowing in the rain. I know that in New Zealand we got slated for the way we played, but we controlled the games against Georgia, Argentina and England pretty well and the number of mistakes we made was actually very low. They were just crucial ones, and ultimately meant we didn’t get the tries we needed to put Argentina and England away, and they did.

“Argentina was the big one and I do believe that if the weather was nicer we’d have played differently and beaten them the way we did in the first Test in Argentina last year, but it’s gone now. They did what they had to do, had brilliant defence, and scored from their one chance and so they deserved it.”

The matter of try-scoring sits prominently on the horizon with Scotland’s failure to cross the whitewash more than four times and the back line’s lack of teeth now the major obstacle to optimism. The players have nothing without belief and De Luca, who at 27 and with 29 caps only scored his first try in March, retains that commodity, but he does not hide from the issue.

“We don’t have to be a prolific, free-scoring team to win Tests. We’ve won with just a try or two, sometimes none, but the World Cup showed we have to score one or two to beat top sides.

“It is very disappointing to be 18th out of 20 in the try-scoring chart for the World Cup, and all of those tries coming in the first game. It’s tough to take especially as an outside back and unacceptable.

“Something has to change. We have to learn to score tries, and whether that comes from a change in personnel or by sticking with players, showing faith and letting them find the answer together I’ll leave in the coaches’ hands.

“The way I’m looking at it, we now have a good three months-plus with no autumn Tests to really bed into the club game and start running well, scoring and showing that belief. There are no magic formulae. It’s about improving your individual game, running the right lines, giving the ball at the right times, making the pick-up and giving yourself the chance to score; all these little things. Everyone wants to see big hits and tries, and we’ve developed our big hits so let’s get the tries now.”

The Edinburgh squad was yesterday given a presentation by head coach Michael Bradley and his assistants Tom Smith and Billy McGinty on how the squad has developed through the first six weeks of the RaboDirect Pro12, and where the coaches want to see them squad go with the World Cup performers back. It was made clear, however, that no-one can expect to walk straight back in when the league restarts at home to Leinster, and a few similarly disappointed Irishmen, a week on Friday.

A bubbly De Luca added: “It’s been great getting back into it. It is almost like coming to a new club after four months away, and you just want to play now, because as players that’s where you really put disappointments behind you.

“There was a hangover from the World Cup, but if you allowed ourselves to be consumed with the disappointments and what went wrong down there, you might as well retire. This is where you use the lessons and move on. But Edinburgh have had some good performances, from young guys in the backs in particular, so if we just swanned in they’d, rightly, be very annoyed. We’ve got to graft our way back in, train well and earn the jersey again.

“I’m looking forward to it. Although we’re only two wins from six and are second bottom there’s only eight points between us and second, so we need to get moving next week against Leinster and follow up with a win at Treviso and start hauling ourselves back into contention. That’s the goal now… hopefully with a few tries.”