'This is your playground': Inside Scotland captain's message to star man ahead of Fiji rout

Sione Tuipulotu may be the head boy for Scotland right now, but he freely admits that Murrayfield is Darcy Graham’s “playground”.

The Scotland captain - and the sell-out crowd inside this old Edinburgh arena - watched on in awe as the flying winger landed four tries in a 57-17 win over Fiji to start off the Autumn Nations Series with a comfortable victory.

The 27-year-old Edinburgh winger was winning his 40th cap for Scotland and now has 28 tries to his name - just one off his club-mate Duhan van der Merwe. The Hawick native was in unstoppable form, and served up a reminder of why on his day he is one of the most devastating wingers in world rugby.

Sione Tuipulotu is all smiles as he celebrated his first stint as Scotland captain. | SNS Group

“I'm super happy for him,” said Tuipulotu. “I walked onto the field with Darcy and the pitch felt pretty good, and I told him, this is your playground, because usually every time we do play at Murrayfield, Darcy's going crazy, and he went crazy again today Darcy's always a top performer for us, and I was super happy for him to start well in this Autumn Nations.”

Graham’s exploits should not take the shine off Tuipulotu’s day. He handled his captaincy duties for the first time impeccably - even getting a congratulations from Townsend for his performance in his post-match press duties.

Did it feel any different being skipper? “A little bit,” he replied. “Just pre-game I suppose you have to start thinking about what you're going to say in the pre-game huddle and stuff like that. But other than that, it felt pretty natural to me, and I was just focused on playing my natural game.”

Tuipulotu’s mother Angelina made the journey over from their native Australia and was in the crowd with Sione’s partner Lara and baby son TJ. “I just saw her out there with Lara and TJ as well, so yeah, that was pretty cool,” the Glasgow Warriors centre revealed. “Because she was obviously at the World Cup, but she said that was a much better experience than the World Cup, just even the atmosphere, but obviously some of the result as well. Eeven after the game, I saw her up on the big screen, so no, it was awesome.”

There was another TJ to talk about, however - his Scotstoun teammate Tom Jordan, who came on at full-back for the injured Kyle Rowe and shone. “That might be a bit of a surprise to maybe you guys, but it's not a surprise to me,” he said, “just because I've been playing with TJ now for a couple of years at Glasgow, and he's really diligent with his preparation throughout the week, and as soon as he came on, I knew he was going to perform well.”

Darcy Graham landed four tries. | SNS Group / SRU

His general reflections on the match were largely positive. “We jumped out fast,” added Tuipulotu. “We need to speak about that. It went probably better than I thought it was going to go, to be honest, that first 20 minutes.

“I thought we were going to be in a real arm wrestle, but the boys really fronted up, and I did say in the huddle pre-game how important that first 20 minutes were going to be, especially against Fiji, because they were going to come out after their war dance and stuff like that with their tails up. So I thought particularly the forward pack really stood up in that first 20.”

“I think our discipline between probably 20 and 40 let us down, and we had to do a lot of defending. We were in 30, and I thought we probably had to make an unnecessary amount of tackles, and that kind of drained us a little bit, and maybe that led to some ill discipline from there, just from, I suppose, being tired in our own 30. So yeah, we'll look at that and see how we can improve that for next week.”

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