Scotland’s Australian-born defence coach reckons his systems will be pitted against ‘arguably the best attacking back line in the world’ when they meet the Wallabies at BT Murrayfield today.
His task of seeking to shut them out meanwhile appeared to have been made even harder yesterday when Alex Dunbar, the defence leader in the Scottish back line, was ruled out of the game after failing to come through his concussion protocols, but he expressed confidence in his replacement, fellow Glasgow Warrior Peter Horne and said they had prepared for this contingency.
“We knew all along he had to go through the protocols so Horney’s done a lot of the training, most of the week,” said Taylor.
“It’s difficult sometimes when a player has to drop out but we’ve had a lot of time with Pete running attack and defence so we knew it could eventuate like that, so we’re prepared for that.
“Horney’s a very good defender himself, a very good tackler. Alex is in there because he’s a big guy, tackles well and he’s really hard on the ball, like an extra back rower. That’s a strength of his, he’s very good at pilfering ball and bringing the line up, but Horney’s very good at that as well, he’s a real accurate tackler and he brings a lot of communication to the group, so he brings different strengths.”
In overall terms he does not expect it to be disruptive for a defensive line that was undone on just three occasions by the world’s best side the All Blacks last week.
“Our system is the same no matter who comes in, so it is just executing the defensive system really well,” said Taylor.
“The Wallabaies have a lot of good plays. Some of their plays they’ve used quite a lot and had good success with, so we’ll try to wreck them in the game, but you’ll never know what Australia will pull out, because they are really good at pulling out some pretty good moves.”
The Wallabies are without full-back Israel Folau on this tour, but Taylor acknowledged that the inclusion of Kurtley Beale in his stead will make it even harder to anticipate what Scotland are up against defensively.
“He adds a lot more width to their game and they use him in a real smart way in that he comes in at 12 and use his passing ability and in phase play they use him to just bring more width to their game. Him and Foley will pick one side and swing to that side to bring that width to their game. So, I think it has just added to their attack,” he observed.
“And, individually, he’s brilliant. He’s very good with his footwork and his offloading, and that’s right across the board with all of their backs. It’s arguably the best back-line in the world from an attacking point of view.
“It’s really hard [to defend against Beale]. Certainly, when we kick the ball to them we’ll have to make sure we have good numbers on our feet, well need to join really well and we won’t want to give many edges to attack with. From that point of view, against New Zealand I thought we did a reasonably good job, and we’ll be looking for the same – whenever we kick the ball we don’t want to kick it loosely because he’s very dangerous from unstructured attack.”
He stopped short of saying Scotland face an even bigger challenge than against the All Blacks, but suggested the difference is minimal.
“I think both weeks are really hard,” he said. “We’re playing the best team in the world, and then the third best team in the world. We’re thinking anyone in the top ten on their day, you play any of them it’s going to be a challenge.”
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