Captain’S Blog: Tuning Up For Ireland
With two games gone and three to go, catch up on Scotland Women’s captain Susie Brown’s Six Nations blog featuring the female Richie Gray and which coach is tuning up for a dance-off! Game two of the 2011 6N campaign saw us playing at wonderful Burnbrae which is a magnificent ground with a very well looked after pitch. Travelling there for a training run on the Saturday we had the happy hardcore tunes on loud courtesy of Lindsey Smith who has found a musical soul mate in the form of our backs coach, Andrew Easson. I think I’ve somehow managed to get myself involved in a dance-off with him after discovering our shared love of a good boogie so if the body makes it to the end of the tournament, it is on! We felt good going into the match and had trained hard the day before with some of our extended squad team mates coming down to make up an opposition for us to run against. Our second game of this 6N campaign taught us some harsh lessons in game management. The Welsh are a quality side with a lot of young talent coming through and played some very exciting off-load rugby. Our indiscipline was an issue in the first half and playing for 20 minutes with only 14 players caused us to concede heavily. I was very disappointed to miss the second half after taking a knock to my shoulder but was thrilled to watch the way the team responded in the last 40 minutes. Standout performer on the day was Lindsay ‘Richie Gray’ Wheeler. Lindsay has had many nicknames over the past few years but ‘Richie’ has seemed to stick with her blonde locks and rampaging ball carrying. Her skills, drive and desire to perform are a big asset to the team and her legions of fans that travel from her home on Arran are ever popular in the crowd! The weekend off games is never really a weekend off and saw us meeting at Murrayfield to work on some defensive shape and some attacking plays. Unable to train, I was put on filming duty which involved me failing miserably at keeping up with play as I was regularly distracted by what was happening on the pitch and kept forgetting to keep the camera on the action. I was relieved when Celia Hawthorn showed up to take over as she is using her recovery time (after suffering a serious knee injury in the World Cup) to brush up on her analysis skills. Saturday sees us taking on Ireland at Lasswade. They have had a good start to the tournament with a big win away to Italy followed by a very narrow loss at home to France. They have strength across the park – especially in their back row and back three – so it will be another stiff test for us as a squad. We are thrilled to be back at Lasswade though and we are looking forward to the challenge they present. Kick-off is 2pm!
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