Greig Laidlaw finally watched Scotland’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final against Australia all the way through, and the skipper was enthused with what he saw.
The rawness and the anger with what happened at Twickenham in October “will never disappear” admitted the Scotland captain, but turning the lessons learned from it into positives is now the aim in Saturday’s RBS 6 Nations opener against England.
Laidlaw was going through analysis film on Monday night when he decided to take the chance to watch the quarter-final in full for the first time, and was surprised by his own reaction.
“Back in camp I had all the analysis tools at my disposal and my thought was if we are going to get better, I have to look at our last performance and see what can be learned from it,” he explained.
“I actually got excited watching it, I was able to take away the emotion. And crikey we played some good rugby. It was a great feeling watching some of it.
“The anger will never disappear, it will come and go, but used in the right way it can help. I was simply watching it as game of rugby and we played well, but we could have played even better.
“We need to understand why we were beaten. It was good to learn from it. There were opportunities within the game that we missed, we lost concentration on a couple of occasions during the game. We need to concentrate for as long as the game lasts.
“On the other hand we were tremendous playing within our game plan, we kicked well, we exited well, played with a lot of skill and put Australia under a lot of pressure.”
“All of these little things add up. We were only just beaten and we could just as easily won.”
In turn, it’s also important to try and take the emotion out this Calcutta Cup game, as Laidlaw thinks it got in the way in the dispiriting 20-0 loss in the fixture two years ago.
“It showed you can’t go onto the field in that frame of mind. That game was one of the poorest games I’ve played for Scotland so it was disappointing from a personal point of view, and I know a few of the other boys felt the same.
“The last time against England at Murraydield we let down the jersey, it was a tough day to bounce back from and it took a while. But having seen where we have come from, how it’s coming together now, it’s encouraging.
“We have underperformed in the Six Nations in the past. But this is our time in the jersey and if we turn it around it would be great for us to leave for the next group.”
Meanwhile the Scots remain determined not to enter into Eddie Jones’ verbal joustings, the England coach even playfully apologising on Monday for making comments that might offend Scotland when none at all had been taken.
“I don’t take anything like that into these sort of games. Eddie can say what he likes,” said Laidlaw.
“The more talking he goes about us and different things hopefully the less he is concentrating on “Are Scotland favourites? I don’t know. Call the book makers, I am not a betting man. We will just control our controllables and give it everything we have got.”