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Ritchie's take on World Cup opponents South Africa
By PA
Jamie Ritchie declared Scotland were “ready to go” ahead of the World Cup after a largely encouraging summer campaign ended with a 33-6 win over Georgia.
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Gregor Townsend’s team head to France next weekend for the global showpiece on the back of three home wins – all after trailing at half-time – and a narrow defeat away to the host nation from their four warm-up matches.
Captain Ritchie is now relishing the prospect of leading the Scots into the tournament, with their first game against South Africa in Marseille on 10 September.
“I’m really chuffed but probably the predominant emotion now is excitement – we’re just ready to go,” he said.
“I feel we’ve built well. We’ve not had a perfect performance yet but for me that’s a positive thing because we know there’s one coming.
“I’m glad we had a little bit of a tough test in that first half against Georgia. We had to manage ourselves through that and then we stepped up in the second.”
Despite their first-half struggles throughout the summer, Scotland scored 15 tries in their four summer Tests against Italy, France (home and away) and Georgia, with 13 of them coming in the second half.
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“Positive,” said Ritchie, when asked to sum up the warm-up campaign.
“I think we’ve shown that we can play really well, we’ve shown that we can come back from adversity, which I think is a really positive thing, and we’ve played some really good rugby.
“We’ve shown how we’ve grown over this period in terms of how we’ve wanted to build when we’ve had this extended period of time together and we’re really clear on how we want to play.
“It’s not been perfect but we’ve had more positive results and positive performances than not and we’re really excited for this first game.”
For all that Scotland go into the tournament in good fettle, their first opponents South Africa have sent out an ominous warning with back-to-back destructions of Wales and New Zealand over the past two weekends.
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Ritchie insists his team – who watched the Boks’ 35-7 annihilation of the All Blacks on Friday together in their hotel – will learn from having seen how the world champions are going about their business in the lead-up to the tournament.
“The main thing for us is it’s been great learning for us to see what they might bring to a game,” he said.
“It’s pretty clear how they want to play and for us, we’re looking to exploit that and match them in certain areas so these games have been great for us to learn from them.
“They’ll be riding high off the back of them but we do well with an underdog tag and I’m really excited for it.”
SA fans are worried about Finn Russell - I am worried about 3 other players. Sione Tuipulotu, Ritchie Gray & Grant Gilchrist.
Scotts have a play where ST gets the ball and FR loops round behind him, ST can crash, short pass, drift pass, around the corner to Russell or grubber for Huw, DvdM or Steyn. GRant Gilchrist is so slippery in the L/O with an arsenal of tricks up his sleeve and Grey is a great leader.... I still think (and hope) Boks will pip them, but it's going to be an arm wrestle.... Boks by nothing more than 6......
I think it best we let the playing do the talking. Come on South Africa. You guys are really good, 5/6 matches won, some by quite a margin.
Lots of places where pundits gave the glory to one team and it backfired.
Where coaches and teams thought they had our guys figured out, only to lose again and again.
However, we are playing well and so are Scotland. The results can attest to that. So this is going to be a humdinger of a match. My prediction:
South Africa to beat Scotland but to have to fight through portions of the match. Probs by 8. Why 8? Because it's the lowest deficit where the losing team don't get a bonus points for losing.
Finn Russell is something else, easily Scotland's biggest threat. Rassienaber have to figure that one out. Will set the tone for the rest of the B pool clashes. Probably better for one to face the Frogs before they go too deep in to the KOs, the longer they stay the tougher they'll be.
There are two things that Scotland are going to have to sort out before the Bok game:
- There defensive lines are vulnerable. They need to tighten their line of defense.
- They need to stop overloading the open side on attack - looking for the overlap. Very telegraphic and easy to read.
Other than that - they have the ability to score tries. From broken play. Going to be a great game.If anyone can do it, Scotland can. Their urc sides dealt pretty well with SA forward power, and their backs are second to none. This from a Bok supporter. Certainly not to be underestimated.
The Scottish piggy is nice and fat and full of bravado, strutting around, telling us we better watch out! 🫣
We all know what scotland are walking into. Two of the best tight 5s on the planet and a dangerous backline. If scotland can survive the forwards battle then sure they have a chance. No point Ritchie saying that we are a poor man’s Ireland
I doesn't sound like he has any idea what they are going to be walking into.