Scotland’s Forwards Coach Dalziel Believes Team is Nearing Top Global Standard

Scotland’s forwards coach, John Dalziel, stated that the team perceives itself as narrowing the gap to the world’s leading sides, notwithstanding their recent defeat to South Africa on Sunday. Scotland is currently preparing to play Portugal this Saturday. At Murrayfield, the Scots delivered a resilient performance against the world champions. However, they were ultimately surpassed, conceding four tries to none, as the Springboks secured a 32-15 victory by pulling ahead in the latter stages of the match. Dalziel commented, “I think we’re on the right path,” as his team gets ready to host Portugal on Saturday. He added, “If you look at even the growth from the World Cup [18-3 defeat by South Africa], I think we were arguably out of that game in periods. We were second fiddle the whole game.” “I think we’ve taken a lot of learnings from that period, learnings from the Six Nations. We’ve grown the group, we’re evolving the whole time. We feel we are getting closer,” Dalziel stated. Dalziel further explained, “We have all the components. We just need to find a way of, once we’ve worked for 60 minutes, to keep ourselves in there, we need to find a way of getting over that last hurdle.” He concluded, “If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. I definitely feel in the last few Tests we’ve fronted up and we’re sure we can be competitive away from home or at home against the top teams.” Following their match against Portugal, Scotland will conclude their Autumn Nations Series by playing an Australia team that recently surprised England at Twickenham. Dalziel expressed his desire for his team to finish the campaign with three victories out of four. He noted that while there would be alterations to the squad for the Portugal match, there would be no overconfidence against the team currently ranked 15th globally. “We’ve got to pay ultimate respect to Portugal,” Dalziel stated. “They’re coming to play against a Six Nations side away from home for the first time, 55,000 people at Murrayfield.” He continued, “They’ve got a game that can rival anybody, we’ve seen that at the World Cup. Their defeat against Fiji, they were very competitive.” Dalziel added, “They should have done better against Wales where they had opportunities to win that game. We’ll give them the full respect.” “There will be a couple of players I’d imagine freshening up, but we’ll pick a strong Test team to win this weekend. We want to finish with three wins,” Dalziel concluded.