Near miss so hard for Greig Laidlaw to take

HE ALMOST did it. Scotland’s ‘Little General’ came very close to leading his charges to the first win in South Africa on the day he captained the national side for the first time.

And so, when Greig Laidlaw returned to the dressing room, he was sick to the stomach. The 27-year-old came to Test rugby late, but his was never a psyche that looked to the future anyway.

He agrees with the challenge of developing more strength in depth in Scotland’s international armoury on this tour, but he plays the game as he did as a ten-year-old in Jedburgh, as a 20-year-old with Jed-Forest and a 27-year-old with Edinburgh: to win. “And we didn’t, and that really hurts right now,” he said after Saturday’s 30-17 defeat to South Africa. “It is very hard to take. Those ten minutes where we went down to 14 men I think cost us the game.”

Laidlaw understands how to play rugby arguably better than any player. He has switched between scrum-half and stand-off and had to do it again on Saturday, after Scotland lost stand-offs Ruaridh Jackson and Peter Horne to injury, and the coaches have an intriguing call to make with Laidlaw, Pyrgos and Heathcote in the mix to face Italy. Laidlaw hopes he starts again because he feels Saturday’s display only began to atone for a below-par day against Samoa.

“I told the boys before the game that I was disappointed with how I played last week and so I was going out on the pitch to do the deed instead of speaking about it.”

He did that, quickening his pass and so lifting the tempo of the game and the momentum of his support runners, while his kicks regularly asked questions of the Boks defence.

He added: “The way we dealt with South Africa and put them under pressure when we had 15 men on the field, I really believe we were the better team for large parts of that game. We proved that we are not as bad as we maybe looked last week.”