THE fitness of the Scotland squad has enabled them to overcome slow starts against Japan, the United States and Samoa in this Rugby World Cup. Tomorrow at Twickenham, however, they will need to play well from the beginning to have any hope of winning their quarter-final against Australia, who Vern Cotter believes are unlike those other three teams in becoming more dangerous the longer the match goes on.
“They haven’t lost a game yet,” Scotland’s head coach said yesterday after naming his team for the match. “They’re the form team. And they’re favourites - not only to beat us, but to go on and win the World Cup. They’re in a pretty comfortable position.
“We’ve seen clips of Australia and know we have to improve our performance defensively. Once we get our hands on the ball we need to be effective and score points every time.
“It’s a team that I feel is the most dangerous at the end of the game. They’ve pulled away from good teams right at the end, so the minor lack of concentration - we’ll pay the price.
“The big focus is on maintaining pressure, getting a grip on to them, play our game - but stay with it for 80 minutes. It’s going to be right to the end. We’d like to think it will
be - if we start well we can keep it. And if we do that anything may happen.”
Unlikely as it may seem to anyone who has witnessed Cotter’s poker-faced approach to press conferences - or indeed to anyone with an idea of how pressurised an occasion a World Cup quarter-final must be - the coach believes that his team can go out and enjoy the game against the Wallabies. Provided, of course, that they work hard on achieving a high degree of precision in everything they do.
“We’re really enjoying the fact that we’re involved at this stage. We would like to keep going.
“There’s a team against us who are very good, probably one of the best in the world. But there are opportunities within the game to have a bit of fun, too.
“Every team has its strengths, and every team has, not weaknesses maybe, but perhaps areas that can be exploited. Our job going into this game is looking for opportunities. And that’s what we’re going to focus on, what we can do and do it better – but at the same time finding opportunities.
‘That’s no different than any other team you play. It’s a World Cup quarter-final, obviously we need to be as accurate as we can be. If we do that, we can find those opportunities.”
Cotter is well aware that there will be times when Australia get on top at the breakdown, and partly for that reason he has concluded that there is no point in merely attempting to play a containment game against them. Instead, his team will try to fight fire with fire.
“We probably won’t stop them all the time, if we’re being honest. But we’ve got guys with big hearts who will scramble and work hard for each other.
“There will be times when they’ll be on top of us, and hopefully we can get on top of them. That’ll be a game of rugby. We’d like to think that, if we work very hard for each other, get off the ground and scramble just to stay in, stay in – just through grit, determination and character – then hopefully we’ll be not too far away.
“We’ve got a few things we can throw at them to upset them. We certainly don’t want to be taking a backwards step in the game. We’re going to move forward and have a real go at them.”
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