‘Chance to do something special’ - Huw Jones urges Scotland not to squander Twickenham momentum

Huw Jones has urged Scotland to seize the chance to do “something special” by building on their thrilling win at Twickenham when they take on Wales in Edinburgh this weekend.

Gregor Townsend’s side have struggled to back up big performances in the Guinness Six Nations and Scotland have never won their first two games in the championship in its expanded format. You have to go back to 1996, and the old Five Nations, for the last time they opened with two wins. Townsend was at stand-off that season as they beat Ireland in Dublin and followed it up with a home victory against France. In each of the past two campaigns, Scotland have beaten England in the first week and then lost to Wales in the second. Jones explained that his team are conscious of the need to avoid the same thing happening this time if they are to have a serious tilt at the title.

“The biggest thing for us is building momentum,” said the centre. “We come in every year and like to think we’ve got a chance. But we haven’t proved that really. We’ve had some big wins but never strung them together consistently. So building momentum is key now. Winning the first two games would be huge and then that will give us confidence. But not too much that we’ll become overconfident because we know that there are big games coming up. If we can win this weekend it will put us in a good place going forward. And we know that then there’s more on the line rather than just trying to finish as high as we can. We’ll know we’ll have a chance to do something special here.”

Jones, who scored Scotland’s opening try in the 29-23 win over England, said there was a determination within the squad to avoid the kind of setbacks they suffered against Wales in 2021 and 2022. “We’ll get to the end of a championship and we’ll always be disappointed with how we’ve done and we’ll think we could have done a lot better with the guys we’ve got in the room,” said Jones. “There was a massive emphasis from everyone sort of saying that we can’t have it again, that we know we’re good enough to beat the teams in this competition. But the main thing is stringing together good performances and being able to back that up and build some momentum.”