Hinshelwood calls for defence of Scottish turf

Ben Hinshelwood has called on his Scotland team-mates to defend home turf against a team he regards as “the toughest opponents”.

World champions England will arrive at Murrayfield on Saturday full of confidence having comfortably disposed of Italy on the opening day of the RBS 6 Nations Championship.

In contrast, Scotland failed to give new coach Matt Williams the start he was looking for with a defeat in Wales.

The Scotland players believe they can improve on last week but beating Clive Woodward’s side is an entirely different proposition.

Hinshelwood said: “England are the best team in the world and they are Six Nations champions.

“They are the toughest opponents so it’s going to be a huge game for us.

“We’ve looked at some of their plays and they are strong across the park and they are the world champions and it’s going to be a tough game.

“They are strong on the bench as well. You just have to look at their line-up and you can see they are a very strong team.

“It’s an exciting prospect because England are the world champions and we are playing them on our home turf so we have to really step up and take the game to them.”

However, the Worcester centre is hoping that practise on the training ground this week will make perfect on Saturday.

Hinshelwood said: “There’s completely new systems and processes that Matt has implemented that will work but it’s up to us to make sure we do them on the pitch.

“Unfortunately for the first half-hour or 40 minutes we didn’t really settle into them last week.

“But we’ve worked on them this week and each game will be a step up from the last game and we’re looking for an improved performance.

“We’ve practised quite a bit on the pitch but there’s no substitute for a game to see how it all worked out.”

Scrum-half Chris Cusiter is also looking for an improvement after his forgettable debut in Cardiff.

Despite the 23-10 scoreline, the 21-year-old felt that his first international game could have been worse.

The Borders player added: “We’ve had a good week’s training and everyone feels we’re back on track again and that we’ve made some moves to sort out the problems that happened against Wales.

“So morale is high and everyone’s confident of going into the game against England.

“We lost the game 23-10 and everyone is disappointed and I looked at the video and realised that I made mistakes but overall as far as debuts go I was reasonably happy with it.

“It took a few minutes to get used to it. It could have been a lot worse and I felt that I did a lot of positive things and I don’t feel that I looked out of place.”

But Cusiter insists that the challenge on Saturday is not too daunting for his team-mates.

He added: “England is an exciting prospect because not many people get the chance to play against the world champions especially at Murrayfield.

“I’ve never played there before in front of a full house so to have the opportunity to play against England there is very exciting and not too daunting.

“Hopefully, we are able to disrupt a lot of their ball and try and stop them playing the way they like to with the passion and courage that people expect of us.”