We believe we have a very good chance of winning this weekend. What's important to me is that the many thousands of Scots' fans traveling to Dublin do so not just in hope but with a genuine expectation of us doing something special again. |
We don't want to take the competitive edge off him because that's crucial to him, but we're expecting him to get streetwise and smarter. |
We had an outstanding pre-season and we are raring to go, |
We have a number of candidates for captain and we will be assessing leadership qualities and their aptitude for the job during the squad sessions over the next few weeks. |
We targeted the Llanelli line-out and it was especially pleasing to see Scott and Ally Kellock come up trumps. |
We want to try and pinch some of their ball. Nathan has a long term commitment to playing for Scotland. |
We will be monitoring him closely this week and obviously we will be considering other options. Ben MacDougall and Graeme Morrison will both be with us in training. |
We will go out and play rugby against France and we believe that we're capable of doing something very special. |
We would have liked to give the crowd more to cheer at the other end of the field but it wasn't to be. England actually played extremely well in the first half-hour, which made it all the more rewarding. |
We'll learn from that and the fact that we picked up a bonus point is a good thing. I was furious with that [the intercept try] because we knew that Ulster play a type of umbrella defence and it's just so easy to break it that Marcus [Di Rollo] forgot to just float it over the top or get it in behind there. |
What I said at half-time was that there were going to be a lot more points in the game and sitting on a lead wasn't an option. We had to be brave in going out to play again which is why the score after half-time was so important. |
When you are away from home there is absolutely no substitute for experience. We are playing against a team that we have not beaten at Lansdowne Road for eight years. |
With my World Cup hat on, we have to get the most of all our players. This is an opportunity. It's not a reflection on the other guys. We've still got to make our mark with an attacking game. Our attack has been under wraps because we haven't had ball. |
You only had to hear the players talking about Andy Murray's victory in the tennis earlier in the week to appreciate how much they believe that Scotland can compete on a world stage. All these things add up. We are where we are in the rankings because of the limited nature of our resources. But what's important is to believe that when we go out against the big guns of world rugby, such as England, that we have a genuine chance of winning. And we do. |