Scotland keeping it Nice and quiet in the south of France

TICKING ALONG: Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend. Pic: David Davies/PA Wire.

If Paris, where Ireland and South Africa clash in the game of the weekend, is the centre of the rugby universe, no-one is further removed from it than a Scotland team going quietly about its business over 900 miles to the southeast in Nice.

We say Nice, but the team is housed well outside the city that sits on the Mediterranean coastline and in the small town of Valbonne. Their work-station is the home of the local amateur rugby club, Stade Nicoise, which is itself at some remove from the city centre.

It’s an odd sort of place. A gigantic, lonely stand cranes skyward along one sideline but the ground itself is a care-worn thing, a relic of long-disabused ambitions to raise the amateur club from the backwaters and into the big time.

A branch of the local university sits next door, so the car park is full, but a lone dog flits around a near empty café with a tennis ball between its teeth as a handful of locals while away their Tuesday morning in a refuge sandwiched between the A8 and the M6202.

It’s the kind of place the world tends to forget, never mind a World Cup, but this is where they go again. Scotland’s opening defeat to South Africa in Marseille, and a second weekend spent on leave, has left Gregor Townsend’s side all but out of sight and out of mind.

For now.

What could they do but paint all that down time as a plus? Townsend had arranged for his squad to have three days off after that first outing, win or lose. Most of them spent it with families before knuckling back down for the game against Tonga this Sunday.

“It was a huge build-up to that first game with a lot of time and effort invested, so it was good to let the boys recover a bit,” said scrum coach Pieter de Villiers yesterday after a training session and a confirmation that all 33 players are fit and good to go.

This air of limbo is compounded by the fact that most of those that make up what is, at the best of times, a small travelling media caravan took the opportunity to return home. Only two Scottish journalists and a photographers have stayed the full course.

If there is an impatience to get the engine running again then it has been accentuated by the decision to put up so many members of the squad that didn’t get to feature in that opener against the world champions in the Stade Velodrome.

Cameron Redpath, Kyle Steyn, George Horne and Sam Skinner have all been asked to share their thoughts. So too has Stuart McInally, the hooker called up after Dave Cherry fell down a stairs, and the refrain from every one of them has toed the same line.

“I can’t wait to get out there for hopefully my first appearance at this World Cup,” said Horne.

The Glasgow scrum-half missed out first time around after picking up a concussion in training in the days beforehand, and the Scots could probably have done with his quick-fire service after the game slipped away from them in the third quarter.

The likelihood is that Townsend will go with another strong selection against the Tongans on Sunday at the Allianz Riviera stadium just down the road. Romania a week later will act as another breaker in the intensity levels before they re-engage for Ireland in Paris last up.

The head coach has already indicated a leaning to give those who fell against the Springboks the chance to dust themselves off and go again, so it may be that he apes Andy Farrell’s thinking in leaving nothing to chance against the Pacific Islanders.

Scotland scored over 60 points the last time these two met, in Murrayfield in 2021, but that was a game played outside the Test window and it hit Tonga far harder in terms of player availability. They had no former All Blacks in their ranks then either.

It’s eleven years since Tonga actually beat Scotland in Aberdeen. That was a third defeat in a row for a side then coached by Andy Robinson but de Villiers saw more than enough in the Tonga-Ireland game this last week to be on his toes this week.

“Tonga has got athletic players, physical players. Ireland were good in their usual clinical way, with the way they constructed their innings, to finish off strongly with a lot of points. Hats off to the world’s number one team for doing that.

“Tonga have a lot of individual brilliance, and whether it be at setpiece or out wide, it will be a different threat to what the Springboks or Ireland bring. System-wise they are sometimes difficult to judge and difficult to prepare for because they can chop and change things up.” Scotland won’t mind. A change will be every bit as good as the long rest they’ve had since Marseille.