SCOTLAND may not have won at Twickenham since 1983 - but there is one member of the current squad who has a 100 per cent record there.
Centre Huw Jones, who will join Glasgow Warriors next season, played at the London ground in the final of the English Schools Cup back in 2009. And the 23-year-old is sure that winning that match can help him prepare for Saturday’s Calcutta Cup clash, even if he was just a teenage scrum-half back then.
“I played in the 2009 Under-15 Cup final for Millfield against Judd School from Tonbridge,” Jones said yesterday. “We got a good win.
“I didn’t manage to get on the score sheet. I was playing scrum-half, and I’ve got the
medal at home somewhere.
“That was massive to win that and play there. It was all the under-15 and under-18s Vase and Cup finals, one after the other, so there was a fairly big crowd, maybe a couple of thousand.”
There will be around 40 times that attendance for this weekend’s Six Nations Championship, but Jones sees no reason why he and the rest of the Scotland squad should feel intimidated either by the venue or the occasion or the fact that they have not won at Twickenham in 34 years. After all, they had not won their first game in the Championship since 2006 - but they still beat Ireland at Murrayfield. And they had not managed to defeat Wales since 2007, but got the better of the Welsh too 10 days ago.
“Going into a game where it is uncharted territory, you haven’t won down there before, that can have a negative effect,” he said. “A lot of what we’ve done recently has changed that mindset.
“We believe we can win tight games against opposition we haven’t beaten before. Going into this game the guys will be quite positive about it.
“It’s an exciting opportunity. Breaking these small records definitely has an effect. It gives you more belief as you go on that you can keep going and breaking these runs.
“I think traditionally, not just England but other teams too might have gone into the Six Nations thinking Scotland might be an easy game. Over the last couple of years and this season especially I think we’ve managed to change that mindset. Going down there I don't think they’ll be thinking this is going to be an easy game.
“The 34 years thing has not been spoken about much really. Obviously that was before quite a few of us were even around, so I think this is a different era, different team and I don't think we need to think much about that. It won't affect us, that sort of stat.”
While Jones insisted that Scotland will not be intimidated by that long spell without a win at Twickenham, assistant coach Nathan Hines believes that England could feel the pressure of their own long run without a defeat. Victory over Italy last time out made it 17 wins on the trot for Eddie Jones’s side - just one short of the All Blacks’ record for a top Test side - but Hines can remember from his own playing days in France when a winning streak became a burden.
“When I was at Clermont we had a run of 77 wins in a row at home,” Hines said. “That is a burden sometimes. The pressure of ‘Am I going to be part of the team that loses this record?’ - that can be paralysing at times.”
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