SCOTLAND CAPTAIN Mike Blair was delighted his dad broke the habit of a lifetime to see him lift the Calcutta Cup—and will be even happier playing “smart rugby” rather than entertaining the crowd in the Roman sunshine this weekend, writes Steve Scott, rugby correspondent.

The skipper’s visible emotion on Saturday was witnessed by his father, who was forced to stay in his seat by his mother at the end of the 15-9 win over England.

He said, “My parents have debentures in the East Stand and dad’s got this thing about being out of the ground quick because he wants to beat the traffic—you don’t go on the final whistle, you go when the ref starts to raise his hand to signal it.

“When I went on to the pitch at the end of the game I looked up to where their seats are and they were definitely still there, so obviously even the traffic didn’t stop him this time.

“My first Five Nations game was in 1990 with my dad, and I was there in 2000 as well with my brother David, so having played in 2006 as well I’ve been there for all the recent Calcutta Cup wins.”

Blair is quite happy with the style the team used to win the game, and will happily orchestrate a pragmatic style to win against Italy in the championship-ending match in Rome on Saturday.

“We have been receiving a fair bit of attention for the fact that we’ve only scored one try (in this championship) and on Saturday we didn’t score any, but we won by playing clever rugby,” he added.

“If we’d thrown the ball around and not won we’d have had even more abuse off people for not playing the conditions.

“Whichever way we play there seem to be complaints from someone about it, but we’re just absolutely delighted to get the win playing some really clever rugby.

“It’s a very fine line between winning and losing, but the fact we’re not scoring tries, if we win games it doesn’t matter so much. It becomes an issue when we don’t win the games.

“I’m sure that 99% of the people watching would rather we won all our games scoring penalties than lost all our games scoring tries, but saying that we have been working very hard on our attacking game and we do want to be scoring tries.

“But when you’ve got a guy like Chris Paterson kicking the goals you’d be foolish not to take the points opportunities.”

Scotland will head to Argentina for the first time in 14 years playing two tests against the third-ranked IRB nation and World Cup semi-finalists in June.

The Scots will play a first test against the Pumas on Saturday, June 7 in a provincial centre, with the second test a week later, most likely in the capital Buenos Aires.

It had been suggested the UAR were examining the possibility of playing at least one of the tests in Europe—Murrayfield had even been suggested—but they have decided to host both games on own soil.