Tournament favourites Scotland made a successful start to their Junior World Rugby Trophy campaign at the Nyoha National Stadium in Nairobi in Kenya yesterday morning, but head coach Kenny Murray warned his players that improvements will have to be made – in both attack and defence – if they are to achieve their goal of securing promotion back into the top tier Junior World Championship next year.
While the score-line may have engendered a feel-good factor in the Scots camp, Zimbabwe’s ability to score five second-half tries is undoubtedly a worry for the dark blues, whose remaining pool games are against USA next Thursday then Uruguay the following Tuesday.
Scotland must finish top of the pool then defeat the winner of the other pool – which consists of Spain, Samoa, Kenya and Hong Kong – on July 30 if they are to regain their place at the top table of international under-20s rugby.
“We are pleased to win and get a game under our belts,” said Murray. “Performance-wise we dominated the game well in the first half and got ourselves into a well-deserved lead, we controlled the game well, executed things well and took a few of our opportunities.
“If we are to be critical of ourselves, we weren’t clinical enough in attack and we left a few tries out there in the first half, and then again in the second half.
“So, going forward we want to be more clinical with the ball in hand while after the break we had a really poor 10 to 15 minute spell defensively, we were a bit narrow and switched off.
“They got their tails up and we didn’t react quickly enough so there are a lot of learnings we can take from that period.
“We knew they would play wide, we didn’t react, so we have to work harder in defence going forward and boys need to take it on the chin, because that spell wasn’t good enough.”
The Scots appeared to be on course for a great win when they led 50-0 in as many minutes after dominating the game through structured set-piece play and inspired individual contributions from scrum-half Ben Ashfar, who scored twice, wing Geordie Gwynn, who claimed a hat-trick, and full-back Dan King.
These backs were aided by a determined effort from the forward pack amongst whom Corey Tait, who replaced Jerry Blyth-Lafferty early on, and Eddie Erskine were impressive. All three of these players scored a try during this dominant opening 50 minutes.
But then the Scots suffered a loss of focus and energy as they dropped off tackles and appeared to struggle with the pace of their opponents. The likely explanation is the challenge of playing at altitude – Nairobi is nearly 50 per cent higher than Ben Nevis – which can make it difficult to breathe for sea-level mortals.
Whatever the reason for the Scots’ slump, it was quickly exploited by their opponents who played an unstructured game full off skilful running and outrageous off-loads to run in four tries, three of them converted, in a 15-minute period in the middle of the second half.
Then, despite having a player in the sin-bin, they scored a fifth try towards the end of the game.
However, Zimbabwe over chased the game and in trying to run from their own line gave away two late tries to Scotland, scored by Ben Salmon and Erskine.
“We have already done a review of the USA and I’ll pick up some more things from watching them live [they lost 33-31 to Uruguay yesterday afternoon],” added Murray.
“They are quite a strong team, quite a physical team, but now that we have a game under our belts here and are a bit more used to the conditions, we will be focusing on ourselves in the coming days.”
