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'I slipped away, had quite a lot of injuries and struggled'
By PA
Damien Hoyland is delighted to have a chance to try and reassert himself in the Scotland fold after his international career failed to take off the way he had hoped. The Edinburgh wing made his debut for his country seven years ago as a replacement in a pre-World Cup match against Italy in Turin. However, he has won only four caps in total, with the last of them coming in 2017.
Injuries have played a big part in Hoyland being unable to build on the promising start to his international career. But now aged 28, he feels ready to make his presence felt in Gregor Townsend’s squad after being selected to travel to South America for a summer tour comprising of an A team match against Chile this Saturday and then three Tests against Argentina.
“Probably not the way I would have liked with the national team, to be honest,” said Hoyland when asked to reflect on how his time as a Scotland player has been to date. “I did really well to get involved seven years ago, but I slipped away.
“I had quite a lot of injuries in that period and struggled to get back in the mix. I’m just really excited to be back involved and to be where I am now. I just want to make the most of this opportunity.
“Every time you’re in camp with Scotland it’s an opportunity to showcase what you’ve got. I’m here to get the best out of myself and show what I’m about. If that goes well, you never know what can happen.”
Hoyland is delighted to have made the summer tour squad after being sidelined from early December until late April with a serious knee injury which he initially feared had ended his season. “I’m absolutely buzzing for the opportunity I’ve got right now,” he said. “I feel like I hit some good form at the start of the season which I’ve maybe not had for the last few years, so when I got that injury, I was pretty devastated.
“I felt like I’d worked hard to get back to where I was. Then after that injury, it took me a few weeks to get back into the rhythm but I feel like in the last couple of games - towards the end of the season - I was finding my form again. I’ve got confidence in my body now so hopefully I can kick on from here.”
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Like I've said before about your idea (actually it might have been something to do with mine, I can't remember), I like that teams will a small sustainable league focus can gain the reward of more consistent CC involvement. I'd really like the most consistent option available.
Thing is, I think rugby can do better than footballs version. I think for instance I wanted everyone in it to think they can win it, where you're talking about the worst teams not giving up because they are so far off the pace we get really bad scoreline when that and giving up to concentrate on the league is happening together.
So I really like that you could have a way to remedy that, but personally I would want my model to not need that crutch. Some of this is the same problem that football has. I really like the landscape in both the URC and Prem, but Ireland with Leinster specifically, and France, are a problem IMO. In football this has turned CL pool stages in to simply cash cow fixtures for the also ran countries teams who just want to have a Real Madrid or ManC to lose to in their pool for that bumper revenue hit. It's always been a comp that had suffered for real interest until the knockouts as well (they might have changed it in recent years?).
You've got some great principles but I'm not sure it's going to deliver on that hard hitting impact right from the start without the best teams playing in it. I think you might need to think about the most minimal requirement/way/performance, a team needs to execute to stay in the Champions Cup as I was having some thougt about that earlier and had some theory I can't remember. First they could get entry by being a losing quarter finalist in the challenge, then putting all their eggs in the Champions pool play bucket in order to never finish last in their pool, all the while showing the same indifference to their league some show to EPCR rugby now, just to remain in champions. You extrapolate that out and is there ever likely to be more change to the champions cup that the bottom four sides rotate out each year for the 4 challenge teams? Are the leagues ever likely to have the sort of 'flux' required to see some variation? Even a good one like Englands.
I'd love to have a table at hand were you can see all the outcomes, and know how likely any of your top 12 teams are going break into Champions rubyg on th back it it are?
Go to commentsYou always get idiots who go overboard. What else is new? I ignore them. Why bother?
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