Scotland lost well. In the first minutes after this painful defeat, Gregor Townsend and his players spoke frankly about how they had fallen short against a better team. Whatever they lack, it is not honesty about what has gone wrong. What the Scottish Rugby Union, and Scotland’s fans, will have to decide is whether Townsend is being equally realistic about whether he can put it right.
“I believe we have the makings of a very good team that can compete with the best in the world,” Townsend said on Sunday. “We are running to keep up with these teams but I believe in this group of players.”
Townsend is not going to quit. He says he has “the best job in the world” and, besides, he is someone who sticks to a contract. So whether he stays on or not, he says, “would not be my decision”. Here is the ledger: in the two and a half years since Townsend took charge, Scotland have won 17 of 31. There have been moments when they proved they can compete with the best teams, beating Australia in Sydney, and England at Murrayfield, and honourable defeats to South Africa and New Zealand. But there have been some rank losses, too, to Ireland and Wales, Fiji and USA.
It is beginning to feel like Townsend’s team take after the way he used play when he was starting out wickedly entertaining and wildly inconsistent. Here in Japan they put away Samoa 34-0 in Kobe and thrashed an exhausted Russia 61-0 in Shizuoka. So they turned up for the games they played against teams ranked beneath them. But either side of those, they were blown away in the two first halves they played against the ones ranked above. They lost 27-3 against Ireland, after being 19-3 down at half-time, and 28-21 against Japan.
Townsend has never really been able to explain what went wrong against Ireland in those first 40 minutes, although he keeps being asked about it. But whatever the problem was, he insisted that it was not the same one that cost them against Japan.
“We were not right in the first 10‑15 minutes of the Ireland game, and it cost us the game then and that was a huge regret,” he said on Sunday. “Tonight we came in up for the occasion and we put real pressure on Japan in the first 10 or 15 minutes. But after that we just gave them too much ball.”
There were excuses available but Townsend did not want to use them. The scheduling gave Japan every advantage, because it gave them a week off between every game, while Scotland had to play their last two matches in the space of five days. “I don’t want this to be the narrative and it’s not why we lost,” he said. “But of course it’s a handicap.”
Even though most of the players who started against Russia did not start against Japan, he said: “It changes your training plan quite severely when you’ve only got one training session going into the biggest game in your pool.” But then he said: “We’ve always known this would be the case.”
Townsend’s suggestion was that World Rugby either “make the tournament last longer so we have no turnarounds or make sure everyone has one” and that “they look at bigger squads, because 31 is very tight. If we’d picked up a head knock or two in our game on Wednesday we might not have had a squad.”
He got good use out of his. It was telling how much better the team became in both the matches they lost after Townsend started to make changes. It almost feels like Scotland got caught in transition between two teams here, the older one who started the competition and the younger one who finished it. For a stretch of the second half in Yokohama, half the team were 24 or younger. There was Magnus Bradbury and Jamie Ritchie in the back row, Darcy Graham on one wing and Blair Kinghorn the other, Scott Cummings at lock, Zander Fagerson at prop, and George Horne at scrum-half.
Throw in Adam Hastings, who played so well against Russia, and there is plenty of talent. “That was one positive tonight with the guys who came on,” Townsend said. “They were young players who came on in tough circumstances.”
If he gets the chance, he is planning to build them into a team around Stuart Hogg, Finn Russell – both 27 – and Jonny Gray, who is 25.
“These young players have shown that they’re deserving, they’ve stepped up and grabbed their opportunity these last few weeks,” he said. “They have to drive the team forward, coaches will be there but the players are the ones that have to set standards and step up.”
The question is whether he has done enough to prove he is the man who should guide them through it. “There’s highs and lows,” Townsend said, “but I know I’ll be a better coach for it.”
You sense he has a lot more to give yet.
