ONE man who understands the emotions in the Scotland camp is Michael Cheika, the Australia coach, who has been through enough similar trials and desperate finishes in his time to know how it feels.
He also has a track record when it comes to criticising referees, so understandably when he was the beneficiary of a controversial decision, he was picking his words carefully. "It is not until you go back and watch all the game you can make your assessments," he said. "You have got to live with the ones you get and the ones you don't. Because of a couple of things that have happened to me over my career, I have become quite neutral on these things."
"If you kick a goal at the end of the game to win, it's a pretty good escape. Saying that, if you score five tries, then you expect to be near the winning side. Maybe we shouldn't have opened it up for them but we wanted to play to our identity which is to play running footy."
Cheika had encouraging words for the Scots too. As he reminded listeners, he had been one of the few outside the Scotland camp predicting a battle royal and a game as close as it turned out to be. Now that his prediction had been shown to be true, he had a simple explanation: "I am a big believer that if you have good people involved, it's inevitable that teams improve," he said.
"I know Vern Cotter [the Scotland head coach] and Nathan Hines [an assistant coach] very well. The rugby skills that surround these people are really going to lead to that team becoming a better side. I knew the game was going to be very tight and I was sure it was going to go down to the last minute of the game."
His respect for Scotland was echoed by his players. Adam Ashley Cooper scored one try and had another chalked off for a knock on in the build-up, but knew he had been in a battle. "Scotland are a great team. They picked a team that they thought were best to challenge our XV and they did that" he said
"They are a passionate team and we knew they would come out with a lot of intensity and a lot of physicality and they would challenge us. They got off to a good start and executed their strategy well, we were lucky to come away with a win.
That was also view from Will Genia, whose last experience of Scotland was captaining the side that lost in Newcastle, New South Wales: "They played so well. That first half, they maintained possession, they built momentum in our 22 and came away with points pretty much the whole time. You have to give credit to them, they were a whisker away from being in a semi final." he said. "We got lucky this time and are really grateful for another week of being here."
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