1
'We’ve done it three times now': Jamie Ritchie is confident in Scotland's superior fitness
By PA
Jamie Ritchie feels Scotland can take “loads of confidence” from their strong fightback against France this calendar year ahead of the upcoming World Cup.
Gregor Townsend’s side were 27-10 down to the full-strength Les Bleus in Saint-Etienne on Saturday night, but roared back to 27-27 before succumbing to a late Thomas Ramos penalty and losing 30-27 against the team ranked second in the world.
Similarly, in February, the Scots mounted a stirring recovery from 19-0 down to get within four points of the French in Paris in the Six Nations before a late try gave the hosts a 32-21 victory. And last week at Murrayfield, Scotland overturned a 21-3 deficit to defeat Fabien Galthie’s team by a 25-21 scoreline.
“We can take loads of confidence,” said skipper Ritchie. “I don’t know many teams in the world that can go 18 points down (last week), 17 points down (on Saturday), 19 points down (in February) against France and come back to be in a position to win it at the end.
“We’ve done it three times now. I’m really proud of that and there is loads of confidence we can take from it, but there are small learnings we can take. They are not massive fixes and I know we can do them because we did it for 75 minutes of this game.”
Ritchie feels Scotland’s ability to stage back-to-back recovery missions against one of the top teams on the planet is testament to their fitness ahead of the World Cup.
“I’m a little bit tired, a little bit frustrated and there’s also a bit of pride,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit of everything.
“I feel like we started really well which was what we asked of the boys during the week. We focused on that on the back of last week and I thought we did it really well.
“We weathered a bit of a momentum shift where we gave away a few penalties, but we were only three points down going into half-time having been a man down. I was happy with that.
“I knew that we would be the fitter team in the end, which we showed. But I’m a bit frustrated with that five-minute period at the start of the second half where we know that they are dangerous on counter-attack and we let them score two tries.
“We came into the huddle and said, ‘we were 21-3 down last week and came back so there is no reason why we can’t do it this week’.
“We didn’t need to change what we were trying to do, but in defence we needed to make sure we were forcing a tackle contest off kicks and getting into our system.”
Trending on RugbyPass
2
Stuart Lancaster 'wants out' of Racing 92 and eyeing Euro giants job
3
Henry Arundell lined up for early England homecoming
4
Government provides bleak assessment on the state of the Premiership
5
Latest Comments
It is if he thinks he’s got hold of the ball and there is at least one other player between him and the ball carrier, which is why he has to reach around and over their heads. Not a deliberate action for me.
Go to commentsI understand, but England 30 years ago were a set piece focused kick heavy team not big on using backs.
Same as now.
South African sides from any period will have a big bunch of forwards smashing it up and a first five booting everything in their own half.
NZ until recently rarely if ever scrummed for penalties; the scrum is to attack from, broken play, not structured is what we’re after.
Same as now.
These are ways of playing very ingrained into the culture.
If you were in an English club team and were off to Fiji for a game against a club team you’d never heard of and had no footage of, how would you prepare?
For a forward dominated grind or would you assume they will throw the ball about because they are Fijian?
A Fiji way. An English way.
An Australian way depends on who you’ve scraped together that hasn’t been picked off by AFL or NRL, and that changes from generation to generation a lot of the time.
Actually, maybe that is their style. In fact, yes they have a style.
Nevermind. Fuggit I’ve typed it all out now.
Go to comments