Rugby World Cup: Sean Maitland’s family ties add spice to Samoa clash

Sean Maitland is tackled during Scotland's opening defeat by Ireland. Picture: Hannah Peters/Getty Images

The New Zealand-born Saracens wing qualifies for Scotland through Glaswegian grandparents but a large part of his family heritage comes from the Pacific islands.

“My mum’s half-Samoan and my grandad’s full Samoan, born in Samoa,” explained the 31-year-old.

“So I’ve got a bit of a connection with Samoa. When I played against them in the World Cup four years ago [a 36-33 quarter-final sealing win at Newcastle’s St James’ Park] that was a pretty special game for me, and I’m sure this one’s going to be another cracker.

“They’re really physical and they’ll be licking their lips a little bit after watching that [Ireland] game. So we’ve got to front up, we’ve got to sort it out.”

Maitland was as upset, frustrated and angry as all the Scotland players after the Yokohama flop against Ireland in Sunday’s opener but insists that the squad must lift themselves quickly to save their World Cup dream.

“The good thing about being at a World Cup is that we have a second chance,” he said. “We’ve got eight days to get it right. I’m sure there are going to be some changes, and that’s got to happen, but as [head coach] Gregor [Townsend] said in the dressing room, the main thing is that we stay tight and we’ve got each other’s back. Now we go again.”

Clearly a huge overall upturn in performance is required from Sunday but asked what specific areas, Maitland said: “We know our kicking game has got to improve. We didn’t really utilise it, especially at a time when Ireland are suffocating you. Instead we tried to chuck the ball around and they got those turnovers and ended up in our five-metre channel. We need to look to our kicking game a bit more.”

The straight-talking Maitland was honest when it was put to him that the Scottish performance at the weekend was, quite simply, a total stinker from start to finish.

“Yes it certainly was. You can’t start a Test match like that, especially against a team like Ireland,” he said.

“The first 30 minutes of the game were pretty bad and after two tries we were chasing our tails. A couple of their tries came off our mistakes and that was just execution. That’s down to us as a backline, and we just need to get it right.

“If a couple of passes had stuck it could have been different but going into the second half 19-3 and the weather getting bad, the damage had already been done.

“We had a pretty clear gameplan, we just didn’t execute it. It was pretty crap, pretty sh**. You’re chasing the game against a quality team like Ireland and it was always going to be difficult chasing the game in the second half with a wet ball. It was always going to be tough.”

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