Tom English believes that Scotland can come back brighter following their heartbreaking defeat to Wales in The Scotsman.
"Byrne had chipped over Godman, who was the last man in Scotland's defence. He was racing on to a loose ball with a yard or two advantage over his nearest pursuers. Would he want to take a dive in those circumstances when he would have been convinced that a match-winning score was likely?
"It's a moot point, frankly. What is clear, though, is that Scotland will have to dig deep to recover from this. Perhaps every team that was ever worth a damn had to go through a day like Saturday in order to develop the mental toughness to survive. Maybe that's part of the process. You experience bitter and self-inflicted loss – Chris Cusiter and Mike Blair, class acts both, will be going through torture right now – and you grow from it. It was that prize-fighter and sage, Floyd Patterson, who said that it's in defeat that a man reveals himself. Well, if that's true, the events of the next few weeks are going to be gripping. How Scotland deal with what happened to them in Wales is going to define their championship, their year, and perhaps even the Robinson era.
"The errors at the end are all the harder to take because of the excellence of earlier. Before the deluge of Welsh points, we saw things that ought to get us excited. At last, we had a vision of a new Scotland, a Scotland that dictated the play, that was clever and clinical in possession and organised and defiant without the ball. The huff and puff of multiple, and fruitless, phases that we saw too often in the recent past, was gone and instead there came a directness and an intelligence that had the Welsh rocking for more than 70 minutes. Warren Gatland said the Scots didn't create much. With respect to the Kiwi, he was talking garbage."
RSS feed
