Scotland rugby captain Jamie Ritchie gets back in touch with roots on visit to Fife club that helped launch his rugby career

All that stands in the way of the Scots, currently ranked fifth in the world, racking up more victories against the four teams rated above them – Ireland, France, New Zealand and South Africa – is consistency in delivering their A game, reckons the former Howe of Fife flanker.

The 26-year-old delivered that assessment of the national team’s prospects at this year’s Rugby World Cup in France during a visit to another of his old clubs, Madras Former Pupils in St Andrews, last Thursday for a Tartan Touch evening sponsored by pizza firm Papa Johns.

His team will have to beat at least one of two of the four sides ranked above them – the top-rated Irish or the Springboks, the current world champions – to progress at the cup as they share a pool with them, along with Tonga and Romania.

That will require them to fly in the face of the form-book as they’ve not beaten Ireland since 2017, having lost eight matches since, most recently a 22-7 defeat in Edinburgh in March at this year’s Six Nations, and they’ve not got the better of the South Africans for 13 years, losing seven matches in the meanwhile, the latest by 30-15 in the capital in November 2021.

Ritchie believes his team are capable of that, though, pointing to their third-placed finish at 2023’s Six Nations, behind only Ireland and France, as a sign of progress.

“We had a pretty successful Six Nations,” he said. “Beforehand, if you had asked anyone outside the group if they would take outright third behind arguably the best two teams in the world, they probably would have said yes.

“The France game is the one that hurts the most because arguably we were the better team on the day – we just didn’t quite get it right at the start of the game and at the end.