LAST week's Autumn Test against New Zealand was the fastest game of rugby Ross Ford has been involved in. This week he may play in his toughest.
South Africa, who visit Murrayfield tomorrow, will present a different kind of challenge from the All Blacks, the Edinburgh hooker believes. But he has resisted the temptation to indulge in wishful thinking by telling himself that a slightly slower m
atch might also be slightly easier.
Instead, he expects an even harder physical challenge than was presented by the New Zealanders.
"There was a real pace to the game last weekend," Ford said yesterday. "In fact it was probably one of the quickest games I've played in. It was quite hard to keep up the intensity, and at half-time a lot of the boys needed the ten minutes to recover.
"This weekend will still be tiring, but in a different way. I think it will be a lot more direct. The South Africans are a very physical team and they'll be looking to muscle us out of the game.
"They'll put a lot of pressure on us and try to disrupt our set piece. They've got a great lineout – Victor Matfield is one of the best in the world – and their scrum is pretty good too.
"We'll just have to match them. Everybody is quite confident in our ability and physicality now. But it's about being technically good as well."
Scotland lost 32-6 to New Zealand last week, but the result has not left them too downhearted. Instead, they have concentrated on what went right during that game, and what they can do to make a few more things go right tomorrow.
"There were a lot of positives to take from the game," Ford insisted. "There were two or three scoring opportunities we didn't finish, for example.
"It's about being more clinical and streetwise. It's just being more able to adapt to situations – picking the right pass, the right move."
Ford was at the heart of the one area of Scotland's game which everyone agreed went very well – the scrum. But, while tighthead prop Euan Murray in particular won the individual battle with his opposite number, the home side could still not turn set-piece pressure into points, failing to score when they were camped in the All Blacks' 22 against a pack reduced by a sin-binning to seven men.
There was an argument that the All Blacks should have been penalised for collapsing the scrum, but Ford was philosophical about it. "I thought we had a very dominant scrum," was as close as he came to suggesting New Zealand might not have been entirely within the laws in their attempts to negate that dominance. "Things didn't go our way, but we just have to adapt to what happens and how the referee sees it."
