Empty Words and Shattered Dreams; FIXTURES RUGBY WORLD CUP INQUEST; Scotland Promised to Shake Up World Order but It All Proved to Be Bluster and Bravado
SCOTLAND'S rugby players will begin making their way home today, shattered dreams packed away for another four years.
All the brave talk in the build-up to this World Cup of a team capable of not only competing but winning the tournament seems so empty amid the tears and recriminations that followed the defeat to Japan on Sunday and the exit before the knockout stage.
For a number of the players, this will have been their final footsteps on the World Cup stage, for some the last time they will pull on the Scotland shirt.
'I always feel that coaches don't have the ownership on how you should feel,' said Gregor Townsend. 'That's for the players, they put the effort in over four months.
'Some of them might be thinking this is the last time they'll play in a World Cup. For some, it might be the last time they play for Scotland.
'You can only feel for them. No one wanted to be in this situation, so it isn't great.
'But they are a mature group. They're emotionally mature, they're a tight group and we'll come together and have chats away from the topic of win or loss.
'There is no analysis performance for this group over the few days. We've got weeks to analyse why we didn't get to our best level and to play a knockout game.'
Yet the search for answers must begin immediately. Townsend claims the dice was loaded in favour of Japan and against the other teams in Pool Abefore the World Cup started. He felt the fixture scheduling helped the host nation and was 'a handicap' to the other four sides in the group.
He was at pains to stress this wasn't an excuse for his side's failure to make the knockout stage. But he certainly felt the fact every team had at least one four or five-day turnaround apart from Japan gave them a huge advantage.
'I don't want this to be the narrative and it's not why we lost,' said Townsend. 'It was always going to be very tough when that draw was made. The fact we had to do something different on Wednesday as most of the players who started on that day against Russia didn't start on the Sunday against Japan.
'It changes your training plan quite severely when you've only got one training session going into the biggest game in your pool. We've always known this would be the case and would be a challenge and that's why I was delighted to see the way we started against Japan.
'It didn't seem to have taken too much out of them and obviously as we went into the second half it didn't effect us hugely but of course it's a handicap. …
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