Jim Telfer’s rugby philosophy was famously shaped by his involvement in the Lions’ tour to New Zealand in 1966. Gregor Townsend is too much of a coaching magpie to lean so heavily on just one source, but there is little doubt that the few months of 1993 that he spent turning out for Warringah, in the northern suburbs of Sydney, was a formative influence on his thinking about the game.
One of Townsend’s early games for Warringah was against Randwick, pioneers of the pancake-flat alignment that was an Australian hallmark, who had Lloyd Walker at fly half. The former Wallabies playmaker was 34, had been out of Test rugby for four years, and the 20-year-old tyro Townsend, newly capped himself, thought he looked out of shape. The Scot reckoned he could show the old boy a thing or two.
Instead, he was taught a lesson. “Walker was so flat from scrum and phase ball that I could almost touch him,” Townsend recalled in his autobiography. “His lack of pace didn’t prove to be a drawback for him — he started so close to the advantage line that he was soon getting in behind us, causing panic in our defence. When I changed tack and marked him directly, he began to deliver some deadly accurate wrist-passes to runners on either side of him.”
Townsend’s own style of play, stationing himself in the heavy traffic of a game, evolved from those experiences. And while the world game, a glut of Test matches, forensic analysis and globetrotting players have made styles more homogenous, Townsend can still see the old Wallaby DNA in the way Australia play today. And maybe there is a bit of it in the way Scotland play as well.
Certainly these teams have been evenly matched over recent times, with six of the past seven games settled by margins of less than a converted try. The exception was the most recent clash, at Murrayfield in November 2017, when Scotland won 53-24. Dave Rennie, the Australia head coach, pointed out that the result owed much to the fact the Wallabies played half the game with 14 men, but he also admitted that a few of his players still carried scars from that experience.
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The Tongan players who found themselves on the wrong end of another Murrayfield mauling last weekend have had to lick a few wounds too, but at least they have the consolation of knowing that the Scotland wings who scored six of the ten tries they conceded have been dropped from the side to play Australia tomorrow. Kyle Steyn, who got four, is on the bench and Rufus McLean, who claimed two, is out of the squad altogether.
It is a turn of events that may look to have the quixotic Townsend selection fingerprints all over it, but there is method in his, er, method. Far from thumbing his nose at continuity, the coach is actually restoring it, having named a starting line-up that features 13 of the players he sent out against France in the final match of this year’s Six Nations. As the Scots won that game, their first victory in Paris for 22 years, and as many of those players were subsequently chosen for the Lions, the strategy makes a great deal of sense.
“We came together two or three week ago and referenced that game,” Townsend said. “We hadn’t had an opportunity to review it, which is always the same with the last game of a campaign. We looked to see what worked well and how we can build on it. What we did in the last 20 phases [which ended with Duhan van der Merwe scoring the winning try] showed the fitness and togetherness of that team. They found a way to win. Seeing clips of it again is important.
“The more we can get our players back together, they quicker they get back to where they were in the last Six Nations. We know it won’t be perfect on Sunday but we’ve seen enough to suggest those bonds are getting formed quickly again.”
The big loser would appear to be Blair Kinghorn, whose versatility is no great blessing at a time when Scotland have such impressive specialists in the three positions he can cover. Kinghorn, last weekend’s fly half, drops out of the match squad, while there are two potential debutants with Ewan Ashman, the Sale hooker, and Josh Bayliss, the Bath loose forward, named on the bench.
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Townsend is well aware that the real autumn programme starts tomorrow and that last weekend’s outing was nothing more than a cobweb-removal exercise. In six outings against Australia as a player he never tasted victory once; in two games coaching against them he has not tasted defeat. Standing third in the world rankings, with Scotland seventh, the Wallabies should be clear favourites, but if they struggle to find a significant edge in a stadium that will be full and febrile for the first time since March last year then another compellingly close match could be on the cards.
“We play similar styles,” Townsend said. “We’ve always been close to Australia and New Zealand in how we’ve aspired to play over the years, with quicker rugby that’s been closely linked to Australia. It should lead to a very good game for supporters, although maybe the defence coaches will be nervous. But both teams will look to play attacking rugby.”
