Fair play to Scottish Rugby – not words you often hear, it’s true. Fair play to them for their enthusiasm in putting players and coaches in front of cameras and around tables, fair play for all the access and all the opportunity to pick brains before the Six Nations. If the championship was decided on such things, the Scots would be contenders. Favourites, possibly.
The other week we had six different players put in front of us on a loop on the same afternoon. Radio, television, social media, newspapers, podcasts. They did the lot, with a smile. But…
Everybody’s bored of an unchanging narrative. The players have had it up their tonsils with the fighting talk, knowing that only deeds and not words are going to get the job done, beginning in Rome on Saturday.
There are some wonderful communicators in this Scotland team but, in the politest sense, they’re fed up communicating and are just desperate to start delivering. They can’t say they’re going to deliver, of course, because they’ve never delivered. They think they’re capable, but they haven’t proven it. They’re all in a rugby no-man’s land.
These past weeks, in their search for truth, they’ve walked the line between self-belief and self-criticism. They know that, in part, they can be brilliant and, in other part, they can be brutal. They can dominate chunks of a game with their excellence and then contrive to lose that same game with their mental wobbles.
To hear them engaging in psychoanalysis you could be forgiven for thinking that they’ve spent as much prep-time for Rome in therapy as they have on the training ground. These are fine players, almost in pain with the frustration of not being able to kick on with their country as most of them are doing with their clubs.
From the outside, it would be understandable if you thought Scotland are fancying their chances this year, what with Glasgow Warriors tearing it up in the United Rugby Championship and Champions Cup. There are nine Warriors in the starting line-up against Italy and another five on the bench.
Understandable, but ignorant of the way things are. The fatalism, the quarter of a century of not contending, the grinding down of expectation. Hope lives – as it must – but there isn’t a more realistic bunch of supporters in this tournament than the Scots. When they hear outsiders describing them as bullish they tend to wonder what planet these people are living on.
The backdrop to this Six Nations is anger over head coach Gregor Townsend and his inability to take the team forward. This is his ninth campaign. On his watch, Scotland have finished fifth once, fourth on five occasions (including the past two) and third twice. He’s won 19 out of 40 Tests.