Stuart Hogg was screaming to Finn Russell to give him the ball in what might have been a pivotal moment in Saturday’s Calcutta Cup clash, but it was just one of several opportunities missed in defeat to England.
The Scotland full-back got on his stand-off’s shoulder after Russell snared an interception inside his own 22 midway through the second-half, but with speedster Hogg about to turn on the after-burners his Glasgow team-mate kicked instead, and the ball harmlessly went into touch.
The score would have put Scotland ahead for the first time in a tight contest although new England head coach Eddie Jones, never able to resist a dig, called the win “easy” but instead a 15-9 defeat means the Scots have not beaten England since 2008, not scored a try against them at Murrayfield since 2002 and have now recorded eight successive losses in the RBS 6 Nations.
Hogg had no doubts that this was an opportunity missed in general, not just the specific one after the interception.
“I was calling for it alright, and Finn apologised as soon as he kicked it,” said the full-back. “On another day we would hgave scored from that, but it’s these little margins that are the difference between winning and losing a game.
“It was one of the chances we didn’t take. There was a long way to go (to the try-line) but I would have backed myself.”
England’s defence an area where they had clearly done considerable work in the seven training sessions since their new coaching team came in proved too strong for the Scots to break down.
“Credit to them, I thought their defence was pretty good,” he said. “I think for Wales next week we have to reset a little quicker off the ball, at times we were going with just one-out runners and that’s when it became slow for us.
“Wales will be a same-way team, forwards punching round the corners all day and they will be sticking high balls up again. We’ll look at their game against Ireland and see what we can learn from our game and hopefully there will be chances that we can finish off next week.”
Hogg doesn’t believe that the defeat, while undeniably a setback, will stop Scotland’s progress.
“We’re bitterly disappointed by the defeat. We worked incredibly hard through the week on our patterns of play but unfortunately it didn’t come off for us.
“But it doesn’t feel like a step backwards, definitely not. Obviously a win first up would have done wonders for everybody but we will knuckle down and keep working hard.
“We can’t dwell on this too much. We need to look at what went wrong and move on quickly.”
The Scots at least have no further serious injuries coming out of the game for the trip to Wales, and will regroup at Murrayfield this morning.