SCOTLAND’S Calcutta Cup-winning heroes have been given a reminder with this week’s recall to the squad of highly experienced rivals that they cannot let their standards drop even in training if they want to be among those given the chance to build on that success, according to British & Irish Lions winger Sean Maitland.
The scorer of Scotland’s second try in that long-awaited win over England revelled in that occasion, but said it had all been over too quickly and while time has flown since, there has been enough respite for others to recover and add additional competition to training this week.
“It was a bit weird,” he said. “Saturday and Saturday night went real quick and I wanted it to last longer, that feeling. Having such a great win and being around the boys, but then you’re waking up and on a plane back to London, that was a bit of a shame. But the week flew by and I was lucky enough I wasn’t required to play for Sarries. Fair play to Mark McCall he wanted to look after me, so it went real quick and I was probably most sorry I wasn’t around the boys a bit more to enjoy the moment I guess.
“Now we are all competing but we know that comes with the job. With Byron [McGuigan] coming back it is just going to add that extra competition. I’ve said it 100 times, there is so much competition these days, and it is just going to get the best out of you in how you train and how you prepare. No one is just chilling, everyone is pushing each other. We’ve got some quality coming back in. Some headaches for the coaches, for sure. A lot of experience – it is good to see Richie back, and Fraser and Alex and Duncan Taylor – so much quality and so much competition. It is not a bad headache for the coaches to have.
It is consistency we are after. Just because we have beaten England, no one thinks they are definitely going to start again – so that’s good to see. No-one is complacent.”
As well as McGuigan, who made a memorable debut when scoring two tries against Australia in November, another back-three man who played in the autumn, Lee Jones, has also recovered from injury to rejoin the squad.
That may be all the more timely given conflicting claims about the fitness of Maitland’s back three colleagues, assistant coach Mike Blair having indicated on Monday that Tommy Seymour, who hobbled from the field during the win over England, had taken part in training, whereas there have been subsequent reports that neither he nor Stuart Hogg did so, Maitland seeming to confirm the latter.
“I don’t know what happened to Hoggy, but Tommy seems like he is getting better. I think they’ll be fine, if they get picked. We’ll see,” he said, with a smile.
Whether or not the newcomers are required for the match 22 their involvement can only be beneficial in pursuing head coach Gregor Townsend’s approach when seeking to replicate match intensity on the training pitch.
“We’re still looking to get that extra five per cent, because it’s an even bigger challenge this weekend,” said Maitland. “All areas of our game we need to improve. We can take a lot of confidence from the last game but we know it’s a different beast. Everyone’s been talking about our away form but we’re not resting on our laurels. There was a bit of an edge to our training yesterday, from the whole squad, the whole 42 players. That’s going to help us massively this week.”
He believes that the way things panned out against England provided evidence of the efficacy of those methods.
“It’s how we prepare,” said Maitland. “The coaches do such a great job on doing their analysis on teams – Gregor’s and his team’s detail is second to none – and how we prepare is how get confidence on executing our game-plan. Against England, the way we trained is how we played – 100 per cent – that whole week there was edge to us. It is good to see there is no complacency and from day one the boys were fizzing – yesterday wasn’t a learning day.
“Obviously with all our new players and how we want to play we were straight into it. There are always going to be errors with how we train, but our leadership group do an amazing job on getting the boys prepared.”
He noted, too, that the team’s move to purpose-build facilities at the Oriam sports centre, with indoor and outdoor pitches, as well as gym facilities all the shortest of walks from the team hotel.
“The good thing is that we have a lot of time for meetings, with us being over the road now it is real handy for us to get over here and get some good quality training in,” Maitland observed.
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