Scotland winger Kyle Steyn has admitted results are “just not good enough” at the moment and said fans are right to doubt whether they “have the marbles in the big moments.”
Scotland have endured a dispiriting Quilter Nations Series, seeing a golden opportunity to record a first win over New Zealand in their history slip away and then squandering a 21-0 lead against Argentina.
Earlier this month, Gregor Townsend’s side were level with the All Blacks, who had just gone down to 14 men, heading into the final quarter but fell 25-17 before collapsing from 21 points ahead against the Pumas a week later – conceding five unanswered tries, losing 33-24 and causing Murrayfield to boo the team.
Scotland can at least end their autumn with a victory by beating Tonga this weekend but that will hardly make up for the disappointment of the past fortnight, with Steyn acknowledging the team need to take a hard look at themselves.
“I’m sure the people of Scotland are sick of hearing excuses,” the 31-year-old said. “To be honest, we don’t have any. We’re not hiding from this. At some point we’re going to have to ask ourselves the question, ‘Do we have the marbles in the big moments?’
“Until we show it, then fair enough to the Scottish people for doubting that. But, yeah, we’ll bust our arse off to make sure we try to find the answers.
“I’m sick of saying the same thing, you know, that it comes down to moments and it comes down to doing the basics while in those tough moments. But that is it. A couple of weeks in a row, we’ve had the game, we’ve had chances where we certainly could have put our mark on the game and probably taken the win, and both times we’ve let New Zealand and we’ve let Argentina back in and let them take the win. It’s just not good enough.”
Steyn also said he has no problem with fans booing the team, as they did at the end of the Argentina disappointment, and wants the team to use it as motivation.
“We can only say sorry,” he said. “We’re really thankful for the fans who stayed behind and clapped us because, again, there’s no shortage of effort there. We thank the people who can appreciate that.
“And to those who booed, I think we just appreciate that the people of Scotland demand a higher standard of us, and we demand that of ourselves too. I’m sure they’re doing that because of the way they’re feeling, and that’s a reflection of the way we played, so fair enough.”
During the Townsend era, which began in 2017, Scotland have underachieved – failing to get beyond the group stage at two consecutive World Cups and never truly contending for the Six Nations title despite showing flashes of brilliance, especially in Calcutta Cup matches against England.
They were fifth in the World Rugby rankings when Townsend took charge but have now dropped to ninth, below Fiji among others. For a hugely talented squad – that has been labelled a ‘golden generation’ in some quarters – this has to go down as a disappointment and Steyn didn’t shy away from that assessment.
“We feel like, and we’ve been saying for ages, we’ve got this golden generation or whatever you want to call it; a golden group of players,” he added. “You get frustrated when people knock us down and don’t kind of show the proper respect, but, ultimately, we’ve got to shut up until we do it.
“I feel like I’m being overly negative here, and I don’t want to be. But I think we’ve got a group that wants to be raw and wants to sort of cop this on the chin and look in the mirror properly.
“This group and the people of Scotland don’t want to hear that it was a game of moments and we’ll be better next week, albeit those things are true. We want to look deeper and find a way to reach the potential that we truly believe this group has.”
