Scotland have endured a brutal stretch of training so far this week as they try to put their defeat by Italy in the RBS Six Nations Championship behind them and prepare to face England at a raucous Twickenham this weekend.
With some of the squad dressed in England-style white tops, Scotland were put through the wringer on the main pitch at BT Murrayfield and later Greig Laidlaw, the captain, revealed the straight talking had not been confined to the training ground.
“We have had it from the coaches and rightly so,” he said. “It’s been good. It’s not as though results have been down to what other teams have been doing to us or a case of us being outclassed, we have been shooting ourselves in the foot a lot of the time. It’s all been within our control.
“We have now seen both sides of Vern [Cotter, the head coach]; he’s a hard man. He has high standards and we have certainly seen what he’s all about this week — that’s good, we now know what’s expected of us. He is level-headed at the same time, a very clever coach. Some of the analysis we have done this week, he’s done it in a very clever way.
“He’s been on our case — he’s certainly been on my case, that’s for sure. There has been a slight change in tack too. His analysis has been about going back a bit further into previous tournaments. We’ve had a look at the last game against England at Murrayfield, where we were well beaten and we did pretty poorly. Some of the ills in that game — he pointed out we made a couple of the same mistakes again. We need to learn quickly and not make these mistakes.
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“If we can bring these things under our control then we will be in a lot better position to close out these games and come away with a positive result.”
Despite the long history of Scottish failure at Twickenham — just four wins and five draws against 37 defeats since they first played there in 1911 — Laidlaw is adamant this one is not a lost cause. “Any game’s ideal to bounce back,” he said. “The history is brilliant, of course. It’s great to be part of and it would be brilliant to win. Whoever we were playing next, it would be vital to win the game but there is slightly more added spice because it’s England down there.
“I was looking at the first three games and it’s a total of 13 points, that’s all we’ve been beaten by. It’s not much. We were beaten by Italy, which wasn’t good enough, but against France and Wales alone, 13 points would not have been a big margin.
“We’re not far away but I’m getting pretty sick of telling people that, I really am. It’s up to us as players to step up, go again and put in that performance. We’re all craving to get off the mark. We’ve got two massive games now and if we get something out of these games we’ll be in a much better position.”
Nor is Laidlaw buying into the agenda of a lack of respect from down south. As he pointed out, there is nothing in this season’s Six Nations results so far to suggest Scotland are about to spring a shock result on to the Twickenham faithful. “Respect’s got to be earned and that’s something we’ll be aiming to do on the weekend. The England boys will respect us if we do a job on the field,” he said.
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“They have good players plus a couple who give them that X-factor; they have done well in the tournament so far but were beaten by Ireland. We have good players in Scotland too, and I truly believe we can match them and better them if we turn up and play to the best of our ability.
“To win in a Scotland jersey you need to play your best and so far we haven’t done that. There have been glimpses, but we have just fallen short. We need an 80-minute performance on Saturday.”