British and Irish Lion Tommy Seymour has backed Huw Jones to bounce back from his defensive blunders in Cardiff last weekend and has pointed out that his Glasgow Warriors and Scotland team-mate was by no means solely to blame for the scores that made the difference between the sides as Scotland were beaten 21-10 by Wales in The Doddie Weir Cup clash.
Missed tackles by the centre let George North and Jonathan Davies in for their tries and, immediately after the match, Gregor Townsend, the team’s head coach, seemed to share in the view that he was the main culprit. However, Seymour pointed to wider issues as he offered his colleague his full backing.
“We’re maybe isolating Huw more than we should to be honest,” he said.
“We look back at things as a squad and it’s so easy for everyone else to look at it and go with that [the missed tackles] because that’s the easy part of it, people say we’ll just go with that, but there were failings in and around what happened on the weekend that had nothing to do with him and weren’t his fault, that we need to correct, to put him in less problematic positions.
“Huw’s played unbelievably well for Scotland as we all know in the caps he’s got and he’s had phenomenal moments to help us win games. He’s a talented footballer and any votes of confidence or help he needs, he gets, because we’re all aware of what he brings to the party. Shug will be absolutely fine.”
Seymour also noted that there were failings in the way Scotland attacked on a day when they managed just a single try, from a lineout drive.
“We spoke about that, Gregor spoke to us at half-time and for whatever reason in the first half, the energy, we were a bit flat on the ball and obviously the Welsh defence that’s one of their pride points, they have a great defence and they shut us down more than we would have liked,” he said.
“It could have been a very different game if we’d got everything right, I guess you could say that about every situation but we’ve talked about how we’ll put things right. From my perspective going into this week’s game I think you’ll see a lot of improvement and a very different levels to the first half.”
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