It's a serious whine alright, but I wouldn't let it annoy you.Twist wrote:Talk of Englamd being unlucky annoys me. They were extremely fortunate that France left so many points on the posts, to say nothing of the kicks Madigan and Sexton missed. For four kickers to misfire like that is extremely rare.
Everybody knows the system going in, and the English were the ones who knew what they had to do to finish top of the table. As you say, the French goal-kickers went 4/9 on the day, missing 12 points.
In terms of Scotland 'caving': we made 13 clean breaks against them, beat 24 defenders and scored 40 points; the Scots made 155 tackles and missed 24 for an 87% success rate [source: http://www.espn.co.uk/six-nations-2015/ ... 80692.html ].
In their game against England, the Scots made 125 tackles and missed 27 for an 82% success rate; England made 17 clean breaks, beat 27 defenders and only scored 25 points [source: http://www.espn.co.uk/six-nations-2015/ ... 80689.html ]. So the Scots allowed more breaks, had more men beaten one-on-one, made fewer tackles and missed more tackles against the English than they did against us. Giving out about other teams might make you feel better [maybe?] but there's f*ck all you can do about how they perform, and to be frank, it only obscures that the real problem is yourself.
It was obvious watching the England/Scotland game that England's wastefulness and inability to finish clear-cut opportunities would probably come back to hurt them.