Hadden delighted by experiment - Sport in brief - Evening Standard
       

Hadden delighted by experiment

Scotland coach Frank Hadden has pronounced himself delighted with the experiments he carried out in the Bank of Scotland Corporate August Test against Ireland.

A hat-trick from Andrew Henderson and tries from Ally Hogg and Euan Murray secured a 31-21 success over the Triple Crown champions in the World Cup warm-up match.

"We knew in training that there was a sharpness there. I knew after the 10-a-side tournament that we had that all the rehab had gone really well and it just needed to be shown in a full 15-a-side game," said Hadden.

The Scotland coach fielded virtually a full-strength side but there were a couple of changes from the line-up he preferred in the 2007 Six Nations with the World Cup next month in mind.

The most high profile and interesting was positional; Chris Paterson being moved from the key man in the back three to his favoured stand-off role.

Hadden was pleased with the former Edinburgh utility back's performance and hinted it may be something he perseveres with in September's tournament.

The former Edinburgh coach said: "I think Chris gave exactly what you would expect from him.

"He's a very talented footballer and he made one excellent half break while his handling was pretty good in difficult conditions

"We need to look in a bit more detail as we always do to evaluate how different players performed because it's a difficult thing to do straight away.

"We'll look at how the different pairings went and how the units went and take things from there."

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