FEW Scotland players have known the joy of winning in Paris, but it is an experience that Hamish Watson thought he and his team-mates were very close to tasting yesterday.
The Edinburgh flanker was convinced his team had passed up a historic opportunity.
The losing bonus point for that narrow loss was little consolation for Watson, who thought that with a little more composure – which they had shown in beating Ireland at Murrayfield eight days earlier – Scotland would have won at the Stade de France for the first time since 1999. “We could definitely have won that game,” Watson said. “It’s not one of those days when you’re thinking: ‘F***. They were a lot better than us’. We definitely could have won it.
“So that’s more frustrating. But we also know what went wrong. We’ll try to fix that for the Wales game [at Murrayfield a week on Saturday].
“Obviously everyone is pretty gutted because we knew we hadn’t won here since ’99. We were in the lead and definitely in a position to win – so everyone is disappointed because we could have won it.
“I think when we got the ball and held on to it, we all made yards.
At times, though, we would just give the ball away a bit stupidly. There were a lot of turnovers in the game. We didn’t look after it as well as we wanted. So when we didn’t stick to our game plan, it didn’t go our way.
“Yes, the game was there to be won. Definitely. When Tim [Swinson] scored [Scotland’s second try] I think you saw France were there for the taking. Then, from the kick-off, we gave away the ball away – and they scored a penalty two minutes later. They managed to draw it level pretty quickly.
“If we had kept that lead and just exited properly, maybe got another penalty, their tails would have gone down. We could definitely have gone on and won the game.”
Watson accepted that the the loss of captain Greig Laidlaw had been significant. “Obviously Greig is a big talisman for us. He’s our captain, so you are going to miss your captain.
“Ali Price came on and did a great job, quickened the game up.
I thought he was good when he came on. But losing your captain – it takes a bit of time to get over that.”
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