Some Scotland squad players may have seen their chance to go to Japan for the World Cup pass them by after just one outing in Saturday’s 32-3 hammering to France, admitted assistant coach Matt Taylor.
The defence coach said he took full responsibility for the poor showing on that side of the ball in the first of four warm-up games, and promised a better display as Scotland will run through mostly pre-planned changes for the return match at Murrayfield on Saturday.
However, he admitted that some of those who failed on Saturday in Nice may have already seen their World Cup hopes dashed.
“We’ve had a theory or strategy about what we wanted to do,” he said. “We wanted to give guys an opportunity, had combinations we wanted to have a look at.
“Later on in the warm up games, probably the last game, we will want to consolidate the team we want to play against Ireland (in the RWC pool opener).
“The strategy hasn’t really changed after the result. Those guys who hadn’t had opportunities at the weekend are going to get opportunities and there might also be a couple of guys who were going to get two games at the start and then rested.
“We had one-on- one meetings yesterday and I think the message to the boys is you may only get one chance to show how good you are, and to be on the plane to Japan. If you don’t take that chance, you either don’t go, or the pecking order might change.
“Some guys fronted up, some guys didn’t. And there will be some who won’t get another opportunity, that the decision is made that ‘you’ve had your go, and that’s it’.”
But Taylor fully accepts that a large part of the blame for Scotland’s performance lies with the coaching team for failing to send out a team ready to compete.
“Every opportunity I get to coach or represent Scotland I want to do a good job and we didn’t,” he said. “I am disappointed in myself. I told the players that, I didn’t get them to where I need to get them psychologically.
“I will make sure I do that this weekend, but they have to do their part as well. We all have to do our part. We’ve let ourselves down but we are looking forward to getting back on the park and doing a good job this weekend.
“There’s been a couple of areas we’ve looked at and one of them is making sure we front up with the right attitude.
“Defence is about attitude, about workrate, and about systems. But if you don’t get the attitude right, the other two don’t even come into it.”
There had been a great deal of work on defence in training camp, he continued, but they accepted that all that preparation hadn’t been effective.
“We had done a lot of work on our defence, on everything – and we just left it up to the players to get themselves in the right frame of mind,” said Taylor. “Maybe with it being a warm-up game in a nice place like Nice we just assumed that level of intensity was going to be there, and it wasn’t.
But the talk of Scotland continued to struggle away from Murrayfield can be put right with a tough test to follow this weekend’s game, he said.
“The Georgia game over there is going to be extremely tough. It is going to be hot, it is going to be the first time that Tier One nation goes there so they are going to be really pumped up.
“It is the type of game that we as Scotland should be saying: ‘Let’s puff our chest out and dominate this opposition.’
“So, we get through this game this week, then we’ve got a chance to front up against a good opposition in Georgia away, and the next kind of ‘away’ game is the final pool game against Japan, in the sense that there will be a lot of their supporters there.”
