THREE debutants will take the field for Scotland Under-20s today as they get their Six Nations Summer Series under way with a Pool B match against their Welsh counterparts.
The new boys are the two wingers, Kerr Johnston of Gala and Ryan Daley of Watsonians, along with back-row forward Liam McConnell of Boroughmuir Bears. Four substitutes - Iain Carmichael, Ben Afshar, Gabe Jones and Euan Groenewald - could all make their debuts off the bench.
Scotland were beaten in all five of their matches in this year’s Under-20s Six Nations, but head coach Kenny Murray is hopeful that the injection of new blood will help the team break that losing run. “Liam, Kerr and Ryan have been excellent since they have joined up with our group, and they thoroughly deserve to make their debuts this weekend,” Murray said yesterday.
“Our game against Wales in the Six Nations was close. We were right in it until near the end. So we hope to be competitive again and this time go that step further."
Scotland's other matches in Pool B will be against hosts Italy next Thursday then against Georgia on Wednesday 6 July. Pool A consists of England, France, South Africa and Ireland. After the pool stage, the winners of A and B will then play each other, second will play second and so on in the cross-pool matches on Tuesday 12. All games will be streamed on the Six Nations U20 YouTube channel, while Scotland’s matches will also be streamed on the Scottish Rugby website.
Scotland Under-20s (v Wales Under-20s at the Stadio di Monigo, Treviso, today [Saturday] 4pm BST): K Clark; K Johnston, D Munn, A Stirrat, R Daley; C Townsend, M Redpath; A Rogers, G Hiddleston, C Norrie, J Taylor, M Williamson, L McConnell, R Tait (captain), O Leatherbarrow. Substitutes: P Harrison, I Carmichael, G Scougall, J Spurway, T Brown, B Afshar, E Cunningham, G Jones, M Deehan, E Groenewald, B Salmon.
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