Scotland captain Al Kellock admits he has been lucky to escape the axe that fell on the Scotland team after the loss to Wales two weeks ago and is pledging to get the Murrayfield crowd on their feet against Ireland in the third match of the RBS Six Nations on Sunday.
The skipper survived the seven changes to the team by head coach Andy Robinson, and has been through the build-up and performance against Wales piece by piece trying to identify where he and the team fell down.
“I do feel lucky (to have escaped being dropped). I feel that every game you’ve got to,” he said. “You’re privileged to play for Scotland at any time, and the performance against Wales let the public down, there’s no question about it.
“If we get 65,000 in here they’ve got to get something to cheer about to get behind us and it’s up to us to lift them, not the other way around.”
The bye week between the Welsh and Irish games proved a difficult one for the skipper.
“Generally when you play badly you have the opportunity to fix it straight away. You come in to training for what we call at Glasgow ‘Move On Monday,’ where you review the game of the previous weekend and, no matter the result, you move forward from that,” he said.
“Not having that, it gives more time to reflect and maybe that’s not a bad thing because, based on the performance, it should have been a tough week.
“The result is still in the system, as it should be. You can’t just brush away a performance like that.
“Personally I thought about the game a lot, spoke with Andy during the week, and thought about most aspects of it: the preparation, the training, the captain’s run on Friday, what we said before the game and at half-time, and obviously my own personal performance.
“There is a danger of thinking too much about it but the focus changed on Monday to Ireland, and we took the emotion out of it.”Best policyAn “honesty” session where players addressed their failings and what they expected of others took care of the Welsh loss, but Kellock accepts that a similar session was needed after the thrashing to New Zealand in November a subject that came up in an after-match chat with First Minister Alex Salmond.
“It was actually me who brought it up. I was particularly disappointed that many times it has to be a poor performance like that that motivates us to be at our best,” continued Kellock.
“He just said that game was in the past and couldn’t be changed and it was now all about how we react in this next game.
“We’ve trained extremely hard on those things we didn’t do right against Wales, and we’ve particularly raised the intensity of training as much as we can to that of an international match to help us start games better.”
The pack that starts against Ireland is virtually the same unit that proved successful against Argentina last summer, with the return of Moray Low to tight-head and Johnnie Beattie to the back row.
“Moray has a point to prove after dropping out of the team after Argentina, allied to the fact our scrum has struggled, while Johnnie’s a special player who can make things happen, and it’s really important we give him the chance to do so.
“Ireland will have physicality at every breakdown and tackle and they’ll be disappointed, because they could have won the game against France quite easily.
“They have a backline capable of creating opportunities, and in bringing back Ronan O’Gara they have a quality player who is outstanding at controlling games.”