A JUBILANT Gregor Townsend hailed his Scotland team’s resilience last night after they retained the Calcutta Cup with a 20-17 victory over England. It was the first time since 1984 that Scotland had won back-to-back games in international rugby’s oldest fixture, and they did it the hard way, fighting back after early pressure from the visitors.
“Being tough to beat is really important,” head coach Townsend said. “It usually defines championship-winning teams, a strong defence in any sport.
“We know our defence is really entwined with our attack. We’ve got some really dangerous attackers in our team who we want to give the ball to.
“Getting both of those sides of the game right is so important. But defence certainly helps you win those tight games.”
London Irish scrum-half Ben White had a dream debut for the home team at BT Murrayfield, scoring a first-half try just minutes after coming on as a temporary replacement for Ali Price. A penalty try followed after England hooker Luke Cowan was sinbinned for batting away a high ball that was destined for the arms of Darcy Graham, and Finn Russell chipped in with two penalties and a conversion of the White try.
England’s points - from four penalties and a try - all came from stand-off Marcus Smith. They will now try to revive their Six Nations Championship hopes when they visit Italy a week today [Sun 13], while Scotland meet Wales in Cardiff the day before.
In the one real down side of the afternoon, Jamie Ritchie was carried off the field and was later seen on crutches after sustaining what Townsend said was a hamstring and/or groin injury. The coach said he would not expect the Edinburgh flanker to be available for the Wales game, although there is a strong possibility that Ritchie will be absent for more than just a single match.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here