You’re not supposed to throw slow, floated 20-yard passes off your left hand when you’re standing on your own 22. It’s something sensible parents teach their children not to do. But Finn Russell did on Saturday night, and he got it just right. The ball flew up over Jonathan Joseph, who stretched for it like a toddler reaching for the cookie jar, and down into the little patch of empty space just beyond him, where Huw Jones gathered it in, clutched it to his gut without breaking stride, then burst upfield. It was a fine, foolish pass, a high, wide and handsome folly of a throw.
Just like a few that Gregor Townsend made back in his day. Townsend is unusual among international coaches in that he had a long Test-match career himself, 82 games for Scotland and a couple more for the British & Irish Lions on their famous tour in 1997. Eddie Jones has a theory that men who don’t quite cut it as players make good coaches because they’ve got so much left to prove. Townsend won more Test caps than the other men coaching the world’s top 10 teams did between them, but you wonder if he felt unfulfilled when he quit playing. Scotland only won 32 of those 82 games, after all.
Townsend has always had a very clear idea of the kind of game Scotland should play – “a great brand of open rugby” – but often seemed to be working from a different script to his coaches, sometimes even his team-mates. He was often switched to centre, even full-back, because his coaches didn’t always trust him to run the game from fly-half. Now he’s in charge, he can get them playing his way at last. And you can see how his own experiences as a player influenced the way he handled Russell in these past few weeks.
Townsend was quick to support Russell after he played poorly in the opening match of the Six Nations tournament against Wales, swift to dismiss questions about his place after his middling performance against France the following week. Because any fool can think to throw a pass like the one Russell did to Jones in the England match. But it takes a lot of confidence to pull it off. And Townsend knows himself just how hard it is to make the game look that easy.
The moment that made Townsend’s career as a player lasted just under three seconds. He was one of those happy athletes who seemed to run on a different clock to the rest of us, who have a radically different sense of how much can be done in the briefest moment. It was during Scotland’s match in Paris back in 1995. They were five points down and there was a minute or so to go. Townsend took the ball on the French 10m line, stepped off his left, and was swallowed up in a tackle. As he fell, he curled his arm around and flicked the ball up into the air to his right side.
Then came Gavin Hastings, with such a head of steam on that he sped through and scored under the posts. Scotland won. Townsend’s pass was so good that they christened it, the ‘Toonie flip’. It looks like an instinctive, intuitive piece of play. Until you hear Townsend talk about just how much thought he put into it, describe the granular detail of it, tell how he cut in because he could sense the defence drifting, how he made sure to wrest free his elbows in the tackle and hold contact for a split second to buy time, then changed his mind which way to pass when he heard Hastings call over his shoulder.
“Things do not happen by luck,” Townsend says, “they happen by learning, by experience, by improving technique in these situations.” Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Like Russell, Townsend made a lot of costly mistakes, especially in those early days. There was a bad one in that very same match, which he calls his “breakthrough game”, when he missed touch, a mistake Russell’s often made, and flopped a weak kick straight to Philippe Saint-André, who ran it back for a try.
So as a coach Townsend has a different approach to Jones, who is on record as saying that his ideal team includes 13 players who will rate seven out of 10 in every match, because “if we have that, we’re going to be in the game”. The other two are what he calls his “x-factor players”, men who will play at “nine out of 10 performance then the next week may drop to a four.” Only, “you can’t have more than two of those, because otherwise you get too much variation in your performance.” It’s worked for him, and won him 24 games out of 26. Townsend has gone in another direction. Which may be why his side can be pummelled by Wales one week, then wallop England another.
After that match, the game where Townsend used the Toonie flip, the President of the French Federation, Bernard Lapasset, told the players that the result was a reminder that “rugby is not for the country that is richer, or stronger, it is for the country that shows the greater courage, discipline, and teamwork over 80 minutes”. Which, Townsend will tell you, still holds true today. We saw that on Saturday night.
