Ben White is adamant Scotland have realized loads of classes from their defeat by South Africa and consequently will develop into a greater staff for the rest of the World Cup.
The scrum-half was “absolutely gutted” by the best way the Scots began the event, shedding 18-3 to the defending world champions in Marseille on Sunday.
It was the primary time Gregor Townsend’s facet had failed to attain a strive in a match since November 2020 – the 22-15 defeat at residence to France – and was additionally their lowest-scoring outing since their first sport of the 2019 World Cup once they misplaced 27-3 to Ireland.
Scotland should now win all three of their remaining Pool B matches towards Tonga, Romania and Ireland if they’re to have an opportunity of qualifying for the quarter-finals.
White believes the extraordinary take a look at they had been handed by South Africa will stand them in good stead for the remainder of the marketing campaign.
“It is a World Cup and we’re not out so we have to regroup,” mentioned the 25-year-old. “Playing a team of that quality is only going to better us going forward in this tournament.
“There is going to be a lot of learning from it. I know Gregor is really big on us developing as a team and learning from these situations so we will improve and get better and we will come back better against Tonga.
“We’ve got to make sure now that we’re even more accurate, that we’re better in every moment and we will do that. We’ll learn and get better from it and we will give ourselves a chance of getting out of the group.”
Scotland went into their opener towards South Africa with a real perception that they may beat them. And though they by no means bought their famend attacking sport correctly up and working on Sunday, they went in at half-time buoyed by an encouraging end to a tightly-contested first half that ended 6-3 to the Boks.
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South Africa took management within the second half, nevertheless, and the dejected Scots have been licking their wounds over the previous couple of days, attempting to reset and regroup forward of their subsequent sport towards Tonga in Nice on Sunday, September 24.
“It was gutting, absolutely gutting because you prep for 12 weeks and when you get your foot in the door as we did, you want to try and kick on from that,” mentioned White, who will be a part of Toulon after the World Cup.
“They’re a top side and if you give them a sniff, they’ll take their chances. They were the better team on the day.
“We missed quite a few chances and when we got good field positions we weren’t good enough at all. That’s on us to improve.
“Some of it was down to South Africa though. It’s a great challenge playing the world champions. They’re a top team and for 50 minutes we were in it and had weathered a fair few storms in the first half.
“I felt like if we could have just come out in the second half and built a bit of pressure through our possession game and looked to get the ball a little bit wider into Darcy (Graham) and Duhan (Van der Merwe)’s hands, we could have caused them some troubles but credit to them, they stopped us doing that. It felt like they were slowing us down and we have to learn from that.”
