Johnny Matthews might speak with an accent that places him closer to Liverpool than Glasgow, but Scottish coach Gregor Townsend will be pleased to have his hooker on the ground in Nice after a calamitous run of misfortune.
Matthews was enjoying a day out in the Fife coastal town of Elie when Scotland assistant coach John Dalziel phoned to tell him he was required in France for Scotland’s World Cup Pool B game against Romania this weekend and Ireland in Paris on Saturday week.
It has been an absurd sequence of events for Scottish frontrow players and is likely to impact on Scotland’s effectiveness, although first-choice hooker George Turner, for now, remains healthy. Matthews follows Stuart McInally, who was also called into the World Cup squad from Scotland before he became another broken link in the hooker chain.
Last Sunday night after Scotland’s bonus-point 45-17 win over Tonga in Nice, it was announced that McInally, the 33-year-old Edinburgh flanker turned hooker was heading home with a neck problem. One short of his 50th cap, McInally departed less than a fortnight after being called up.
He received the emergency call to come to Nice because hooker Dave Cherry was forced out after he sustained a concussion falling at the team hotel. The 32-year-old slipped on some stairs and was taken to hospital and held overnight as a precaution. Cherry played the last 25 minutes of Scotland’s opening pool match, an 18-3 loss to the Springboks.
“I was very shocked to get the call but I’m obviously delighted and just looking to throw my hat into the ring to try to get some games while I’m here,” said Matthews at Scotland’s training ground in the south of France. “I was in Elie with my wife and some good friends when I got the call from John. We were taking the dogs for a walk and when I saw John’s number pop up, I knew he wasn’t phoning for a catch-up.
“He said ‘how quickly can you get to Nice?’ and now I’m here. It didn’t really feel real until I got here. It was a whirlwind 24 hours, trying to get packed, find my gumshield, get my boots and all the other stuff I needed. My boots were at Scotstoun [(his club Glasgow’s ground], so I had to shoot there and get them to keep the place open. I then quickly packed and got on a 6am flight on Sunday morning.”
In addition to the return to Scotland of McInally and Cherry, hooker Ewan Ashman was unable to be involved against South Africa after suffering concussion in the build-up, while Fraser Brown, who was Scotland’s bench hooker for four of the Six Nations games earlier this year, would have come into World Cup contention if not for the ACL injury he suffered at the end of the season.
“I was hoping I had an outside chance of making it into the original training squad,” said Matthews. “But it’s a pretty settled group and there have been the same three, four or five hookers in the last X-amount of squads so I knew I’d have to do pretty well to get in. I was disappointed but it wasn’t a shock that I didn’t get in.”
Matthews’s conversation this week was almost exactly the same as that of McInally a week previously. The former team captain left his commercial pilot training in Scotland to travel to France before he sustained his injury during training and Matthews was quickly flown in.
“I got married, came out here for a week to see my best man, Archie Russell [the younger brother of Scotland playmaker Finn, who lives in Monaco], I went to Frankfurt on my stag-do and went to Crete on honeymoon. So, I’ve made the most of the 13 weeks off. It will become the perfect summer if I am able to cap it off by playing for Scotland in a World Cup.”
One thing Ireland will be aware of is that the sixth-choice Scottish hooker has an uncanny ability to score tries and just finished what was probably the best year of his career so far, ending last season as Glasgow’s top try scorer with 13 in 19 matches.
He was also selected ahead of incumbent Scotland hooker, Turner, in the matchday squad for Glasgow’s Challenge Cup final defeat to Toulon in Dublin last May.
