Darcy Graham has recovered from the quad injury that kept him out of Scotland’s final World Cup warm-up match and will be in the selection mix for Sunday’s tournament opener against South Africa in Marseille.
“Wednesday was his second day training,” confirmed assistant coach John Dalziel. “He is fully fit and ready to go. If selected, he is ready to go.
“Wednesday tends to be our more physical training day, the end of the week tends to be more the speed element and the contact. Wednesday was a big day in terms of units.”
The coach also provided an update on flanker Luke Crosbie, who has been nursing a rib cartilage injury since the Tuesday before the Georgia match: “He has trained but not fully with the squad. Could he be available? Possibly.”
Speaking before South Africa named their team for Sunday’s match yesterday evening – bringing the announcement forward by a day and a half – Dalziel stressed that he, his fellow coaches and the players will not spend long agonising over the opposition selection, or worrying about the impact of a six-two split on the bench which will allow the world champions to super-charge their pack during the final half hour using their famous ‘bomb squad’ strategy.
“Not at all [because] in the last three performances for us, our bench have had a huge impact,” he reasoned. “We chose to go 6-2 in the French game and it worked really well for us in terms of the squad. It’s tough, you’re changing almost the whole pack, but when they come on and perform at that level, with that energy, it’s great.
“Whichever way we go with our bench, we know we’re going to get great impact. It’s going to be tough enough picking that starting XV after the prep we’ve had – we’re really splitting hairs on a few positions.
“The guys coming off the bench are the ones who are actually going to win the game.
“Taking on South Africa in our opening match is very challenging, very daunting, but it is something we’ve had our mind on for a long time and we have been building towards that,” he added.
“We believe we’ve moved away from being a Scotland team who goes to tournaments with hope, to having genuine belief. We’ve prepared accordingly and we’re now ready to go.”
While Dalziel was bullish about his team’s chances, he was quick to highlight that Scotland do recognise and respect the calibre of opposition they face this weekend.
“They sometimes get tagged as just bully-boys with a big pack, but they are very inventive in what they do, they’ve got loads of innovation,” he explained.
“They’ve always been a team I’ve admired, certainly from a set-piece point of view and how they can dominate in that area of the game, so it is exciting as a coach to go up against that with the team we have.
“The players watch a lot of rugby, and a lot of our players play against South African teams in the URC, so they know the level you have to get to in order to compete in games like this from a set-piece perspective.
“It’s going to be about physicality and a lot of the mentality that goes into that. We’ve got to meet them on the gain-line defensively, and we’ve also got to impose our attacking game on them, we’ve got to be able bring the speed we want to play at – the speed we have become famous for – into this match.
“Tactically, it’s one against the other. They’re going to slow us down and kill us on the floor and we’re going to look to keep the pace high, and whoever comes out on the best side of that is going to go a long way to winning the game at this weekend.
“It is just about being able to spin all the plates at once in a total team performance, and I think this is what it is going to take in the pool we’re in – four consistent, high-level performances.”
